Title: Brooklyn-based Writer and DJ Jive Poetic’s Innovative Memoir, 'Skip Tracer'

[MUSIC- All of It Theme Music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In a one of a kind collection, Brooklyn-based artist, Jive Poetic, invites readers into an excavation of his family roots, cultural identity, and upbringing, in a memoir called Skip Tracer. In it, Jive tells a story through a unique blend of prose, music, and genealogy, using the language of a mixtape. Sections are titled, "8-Track Cassette," "Multitrack," "Crossfade," "Record," to record, pun intended, the moments of his life.

He tells the stories between poems about his family, what it means to be Black in America, the greater African diaspora in places like Jamaica, Panama, Brazil, and Cuba. Skip Tracer is just out now. Jive Poetic joins us to discuss. He's a writer, organizer, DJ, and educator, and a co-founder of the Brooklyn Poetry Slam. Welcome to the studio.

Jive Poetic: Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: When did you decide to write down your family history, and when did you decide to choose the mixtape method as a delivery system?

Jive Poetic: Okay, so I've been kind of working on this project for-- You know, you think it's a short amount of time when you're doing it, and then you step back and you look at it like, "Wow, I started this thing in like 2014, 2010," or something like that.

Alison Stewart: Oh wow.

Jive Poetic: It's a long time ago. I've been thinking about it for a while. I found these pictures. My grandmother had all these pictures. There were a couple I just couldn't identify, and I said, "Okay, I'm going to focus on who these people are and just try to find them and dig them up," and it just became this story about family and neighborhood and identity and all these things. Yes, and the mixtape idea, just, you know, I'm a DJ, so I just started thinking about, "How am I going to weave these things together? How are they going to blend?"

Then just the idea of, "Well, that's what I do with turntables. I'm making these things blend. I'm scratching." These things appear in the book. Some things are spun backwards, some things are chopped up, some things are composed, like samples.

Alison Stewart: We're going to ask you to read a little bit from the book. What are you going to read?

Jive Poetic: Okay, so I think I'm going to do Go Home, and I'll do Mixdown. All right? How does that work?

Alison Stewart: All right. Let's do Go Home first.

Jive Poetic: Let's do Go Home first?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Jive Poetic: Okay. We'll do Go Home first. All right.

Go Home.

My neighborhood was hip-hop and soul and funk and fistfight and gun pull and smoke clear and finger crossed for speaker box kickdrum to return the block party without missing step.

My mother used the explosions to teach survival.

Rule number one: Always know when it is time to go home.

Summer camp was free lunch in the park then back home.

Trip to Manhattan, then back home.

No matter where you were, if those street lights came on and you were not home, a problem.

Don't make concern turn magnifying glass to find you.

We still have not solved what happened to Little Tasha.

And Mama used to say, "Police cars, sirens, screams, cries, tears, all emergency vehicles, be aware of how far away they are.

How fast? That far close, closer.

How close? That close far was too late.

We always the most almost riot.

To us, they always the most almost panicked because we have not forgotten, Carmella Stevenson was alive when them paramedics lost their grip on urgency.

Mama used to say, "Distraction will get you killed."

Pay attention to your environment.

Pay attention to your environment.

People are temperamental environments, they change without warning.

Somebody once said, "I'm going to kill Rasta Mike."

Said, "going to" and "kill" in the same sentence.

We didn't see Rasta Mike again until a dark alley coughed up his body.

To be nosy is to be suicidal.

On Jefferson Avenue, exercise caution around strange animals.

Mama used to say, "Language is a strange animal."

When tone and posture clash, tooth and nail will be inside joke between high-five and knee slap.

As soon as summer camp extended beyond day trip and styrofoam lunch trays, counselors spoke to me in raggedy street slang, condescension.

Their humor taught my skin to feel Black in mixed company.

To feel Black in mixed company is to know sidewinder, slither sideways through subtext.

As soon as you recognize the hiss, do not run, do not cry.

Thin skin will get you eaten alive in these streets.

We still do not know what happened to Little Tasha.

Still do not know who killed Rasta Mike.

Still do not need to not know what happened to.

You too have instincts for a reason.

Use them.

Like childhood streetlights, they will always tell you when it is time to go home.

Alison Stewart: That's Jive Poetic. He's reading from his memoir, Skip Tracer. In that poem, Go Home, there's a line that says, "Mama used to say, 'Language is a strange animal.'" When did you really understand what that meant?

Jive Poetic: It wasn't-- I think I kind of felt what it meant before I knew what it meant, but I think very early in my life, I started to understand that there were people who were talking to me in a way that really meant something other than what they were saying with their mouth. I think when I was at that time, at summer camp, I really started recognizing, "Okay, these counselors are speaking to me in a much different way than they're speaking to the other kids." That's when I really started to be like, "Okay, there's only one other Black kid here, and she speaks to both of us kind of this way, but mostly me."

I started to realize, "Okay, this is the way in which people address me." Maybe they're being cautious. Maybe it's whatever kind of training they've had, but now I've learned to watch and look for subtext. Recognizing subtext might save your life [chuckles] in this country, you know?

Alison Stewart: As a writer and poet, how do you think about your use of language?

Jive Poetic: I would say I'm pretty obsessive about it. I'm super-aware of where the words go, how the words sound, and what they mean. I think language is culture, and so I recognize, if I'm in an environment that is constructed by language and I'm creating language, I have a big responsibility to be aware of what I'm saying, what it means. What might it mean, who might get hurt, who might not be hurt by it? I'm very aware of it. I think very early in the construction of my poetry career, I was hyper-aware of language and what it meant.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Brooklyn-based writer and DJ, Jive Poetic. His new memoir is titled Skip Tracer. What does "Skip Tracer" mean?

Jive Poetic: Oh, it's one of my favorite parts of the book to talk about. It started as this neighborhood and genealogical research project. Really, my grandfather just kept appearing everywhere in the book, and his name is "Skip." Lucky for a DJ.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Jive Poetic: Once upon a time, when you had to use vinyl records, you know, the DJ's--

Alison Stewart: You get a skip in them, yes.

Jive Poetic: Yes. There would be a skip in them, but that skip would always be so noticeable, you know what I mean? Sometimes, that skip can throw off the whole thing, and, sometimes, that skip will be the thing that makes you remember. My grandfather, and his name was "Skip," and I just thought about, like, you know, there's a skip in the records. You know, there's a skip in some things that I don't know about him, and all these things kind of came together where it's like, "Okay, his name is the perfect metaphor for this thing" because I'm tracing his part of the family back as well.

Alison Stewart: It's a cross-genre collection. Poems, prose, pieces of music. There's photographs in here, there's social commentary. How did you decide what part of your life would be good for poems, what part of your life would be good for prose?

Jive Poetic: That was very difficult for me because I'm notoriously like a private and closed-off person. People who follow me on social media, they'll know, like, maybe I post once like every month or so, a couple months or something like this. A lot of my poems start out long-form first, and then I edit them down, and I look for the poems that are in these long forms.

Sometimes, I was finding that people had a lot of questions about the poems that were already answered in the long form, and I just started submitting these things and seeing how people responded to them. I think, after the pandemic, I don't want to make the pandemic sound like it was a big concert, but, after, people started seeming more interested in the long form.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting. Beforehand, more and more the poetry?

Jive Poetic: I think so. I think when I was doing the readings online, you know, I was reading more things that were longer form, and people were starting to ask me for things that were long, and it was very different from the three-minute, ten-second Slam world that I had been a part of for so long.

Alison Stewart: Let's have you read another poem. Let's look at Mixdown.

Jive Poetic: Okay, let's look at Mixdown.

Mixdown.

Kick drum. Customs agents don't care.

Snare. Your country was destabilized by the flag on their paycheck.

Baseline. Deportation comes with a jail cell.

Chords. I think about this from a distance.

Vocal track. Jamaicans only hear my American accent.

Reverb. They call me Freshwater Yankee.

Reverb. They call me Jamerican.

Reverb. They call me Jafaking.

Compression. Whenever they get a chance.

Sample chop. They-they- don't-don't do this to white people. They-they- don't-don't do this to white people.

Keys. Not even the ones with the dreadlock wigs.

Strings. They know where the money is.

Vocal track. The first time I heard Spanish, it was spoken to my great-grandmother.

Vocal track. The first time I spoke Spanish, a teacher graded me on it.

Vocal track. The first time I needed Spanish, I had to think in English first.

Background. Nobody told me about Jamaicans in Panama.

Background. Nobody told me about Jamaicans in Cuba.

Harmony. School taught Black history.

Filter. They defunded the Swahili teacher.

Pan left. Language is culture.

Pan right. Culture is language.

Compression. They want standard American.

Echo. This is how the world sees me.

Feedback. My birth certificate.

Feedback. My passport.

Feedback. My accent.

Feedback. No fear of deportation.

Mixdown. Luxury.

Mixdown. Privilege.

Mixdown. Distortion.

Mixdown.

Alison Stewart: That was Jive Poetic reading from his memoir, Skip Tracer. In that family, you learned about your family being from Panama. What was the relation?

Jive Poetic: Jamaicans, at the time, were going to Panama to work on the canal and a lot of these things. Also, you know, if you can get to the canal and work, you can come to the States pretty easily, probably, so they were going into Panama, and they were staying, and we lost touch. The same thing with Cuba. They were going to Cuba, and we lost touch. There was a long period-- When my mother was coming up, there was the missile crisis and the embargo. When I was coming up, there was the invasion of Panama. These things broke our family up.

The geopolitics actually split my family into pieces, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older, I was able to go back and find these people, and they were telling us, "We were looking for you the whole time. We couldn't find you guys. We had these pictures. We had these stories. They didn't make sense to us," so it really just became like us reconnecting with this family that tried to migrate around the globe.

Alison Stewart: So you reached out to someone in Panama?

Jive Poetic: Yes, I reached out. I reached out to the family in Panama, and I ended up being connected with the family that was living in Brazil.

Alison Stewart: All right, help me out with that a little bit. [laughs]

Jive Poetic: Okay. It's all detailed in here. [chuckles] What happened was I had some cousins, and they were there, and they went to med school, and they stayed. They've been living in Brazil for years. Not all of them speak English. Only a couple of them speak English now, so it was very-- It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced, to meet family-- I've gone through my life identifying a very specific way, and the next thing you know, I'm in Latin America finding all of these family members who are very closely related. My grandfather and his father were first cousins, so just being in these places and redefining how I understood myself and redefining how I understood Blackness globally as well.

Alison Stewart: How so?

Jive Poetic: I always understood myself as West Indian or American with-- and I had Latin American family, but I think in the United States, understanding what it means to be Black is evolving right now. I think now that I've reconnected with this family, I'm understanding that evolution in a much different way because I'm a lot closer to it than I expected. I was.

Alison Stewart: Well, did adults--? Sometimes, adults will talk about their past. Sometimes, they won't. How was it in your family?

Jive Poetic: [chuckles] Oh. My family does not talk about the past.

Alison Stewart: Some don't, yes.

Jive Poetic: They do not even engage-- Especially when you're from an immigrant family, it's also dangerous to talk about the past, too, because you don't know what that can expose the family to. You tell the wrong kid in the family the wrong-- too much information, he might-- or she might be in school telling that to the teachers and principals, and the next thing you know, immigration is at your house, so it was tough.

That made it tough to write the book because I was always hyper-cautious about what I could say and couldn't say, so I was texting my mother and texting my uncles. I was like, "Can I say this? Are you comfortable with this?" After a while, they just, "Just say it, man. We trust you. We know that you wouldn't put us at risk," and we're all in a much different position now than my grandparents would have been.

Alison Stewart: Tell me a little bit about the photographs in the book. There's lots of photographs.

Jive Poetic: Yes, okay. There were some photographs of people who I couldn't identify. There's a picture of Vincente, and he's one of the people who started-- he's one of the images that started this quest, and I just couldn't figure out who he was, so I figured I wanted to document this, and it was important to me to put him in there because it was the first picture I found that was written in a language other than English. On the back, it was signed, "A mi Prima, Betty." I'm like, "Okay, this is interesting" because only person I know who spoke Spanish in the family, or at least understood it, was my great-grandmother, so I want to know who this is.

I put my grandmother, my great-grandmother in there, which was my grandmother's mother, both because-- My grandmother, she means so much to me, but, also, I recognize how frequently the stories of women get lost in history, for various reasons. Name-changing routines and rituals, the customs. Patriarchy is itself erasure. I wanted-- I just felt something powerful about putting their faces in these books. Then I put pictures of my grandfather, Skip. I felt like, "You got to have Skip in a book called Skip Tracer, and it circled back to him so frequently, anyway.

Alison Stewart: I'm wondering if the pictures offered you any clues about your family.

Jive Poetic: Without the pictures, the book would not have been possible. What happened was I found these pictures, and then I would find names and dates on the back, and then I could. Everything's digitized now, so now I can go, "Census records." Now I can go search things on the Internet, anywhere. I can go to national archives. Without the pictures and the little signatures and inscriptions on the back, I don't know that I would have been able to write this with the detail that it contains.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jive Poetic. The name of the memoir is Skip Tracer. Music. Music in your life. How did you grow up with music? Did you grow up with records? Did you grow up listening to eight tracks? What did you listen to?

Jive Poetic: Okay, so I just missed the eight-track era, but there was an eight-track player in the house.

Alison Stewart: I had one.

Jive Poetic: You had one. What I realized is you could take the old eight-track player and use it as an amplifier to plug in other things.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Jive Poetic: I was able to listen to the record player through the eight-- like I plug it in. My mother had a huge record vinyl collection, my uncles all did, and I inherited most of these records. That was really how my mother put me to sleep at night. Some kids had bedtime stories, my mother would give me these headphones and, like, "Listen to this record," and she'd play Heatwave. There was a group called Heatwave, and she'd play Boogie Nights for me, every night. I listened to this song every single night of my childhood, and then I wake up, and she'd play Off the Wall by Michael Jackson, the album, and that's how I knew it was time to get ready for school.

I don't think I've ever, in my entire life, lived in a house without vinyl records. I still have a huge collection of them now.

Alison Stewart: How did you think about including music in the project?

Jive Poetic: Music actually found its way in without, really, me noticing it. You know, it just-- every poem or thing, there was a song in my head, there was something that just popped in, or there was a moment. I connect moments so much and so closely to the music that I hear at the time. I can remember dates by remembering what was on the radio. Like, "Okay, I think this happened in 1990-something because I remember this song was on the radio," so music just kept finding its way, and I kept making these references. I thought, "What? I'm a DJ, man. Let's just actually use that as a device."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jive Poetic. The name of the memoir is Skip Tracer. When you're writing a memoir, you get to the point when you think, like, "Can I put this in? Should I put this in?" Sometimes, you put something in and you want to take it out. What was that conversation like, with yourself, about how much of your own story because some of it is hard to put in the book?

Jive Poetic: That, that was very tough. Knowing what to put in and knowing what to leave out because once this thing leaves my computer, right, and it goes to the publisher or goes to the agents, or it goes to the world and the media and the people get it to read it, I no longer have control over what they see, what they read, how they think about it, what they share, what context it loses or keeps, and that really slowed down my process. Also, I'm very aware and cautious. I don't want to hurt my family with this project. I don't want to exploit their stories with this project.

Because of that, there were quite a few poems that had to just, quite frankly, be removed. I had a poem, and I looked at my cousin, after he saw the video, and I just saw that the poem was hurting him too much, and it was like it wasn't worth-- the publication of that piece wasn't worth the pain that he was experiencing. That also made me very hyper-- actually hyper-aware of, "Well, then what am I really publishing here? Let me call my mother and ask her. Let me read this poem to her at 03:00 in the morning. Let me check in." Yes, it slowed the process down because I don't want to harm people with-- I definitely don't want to harm my family with these pieces.

Alison Stewart: When the emotions came up, did you talk about them or did you just like--?

Jive Poetic: We tried. We tried. No matter how closely people are related, sometimes, it's not the easiest thing for brothers to talk about how they feel. You know what I mean? It just was too much for him, and I tried to. We exchanged a couple of text messages, and it just-- the thread got cold, you know what I mean?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Jive Poetic: I was like, "Okay, well, I don't want to create distance here with this piece. I don't think it's worth it. There's got to be a way for me to write something where he doesn't feel this kind of hurt," so some pieces got edited. I'm very cautious and aware of these things.

Alison Stewart: I was talking, maybe yesterday, to some-- to a book person, I'll say, about memoirs, and they said, "They have to have an aboutness." They might be my personal story, but they have to be about something, for people to like it. What do you think your book is about?

Jive Poetic: What I think it's about and what people might decide it's about could be [chuckles] completely different things. I think it's about family. I think it's about community. I strongly believe it's about identity and understanding masculinity and deconstructing what our notions of masculinity is and what these notions are. I think it's definitely moving into the world of what community looks like, what extended family looks like, what our relationship is to the art world, and all of these things.

Alison Stewart: What do you hope people talk about after reading it, [crosstalk] a book club or something?

Jive Poetic: You know, with the book club, you never [chuckles] know with the book clubs, man. I hope they really talk about how important it is to document and archive your family, particularly in the houses of immigrant and minority families. It's important to document these things. My grandmother kept a bible, that she inherited from her family, of all the births and deaths in our family. I have it back to 1800s. These things are important to talk about now, so, hopefully, they'll talk about that.

Alison Stewart: The name of the memoir is Skip Tracer. It's available now. Jive Poetic has been my guest. Thank you so much for your time today.

Jive Poetic: Thank you so much for having me.

 

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