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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
At 11 years old, our first guest emulated her idol Madonna at a talent show, lip syncing and stripping to the song Like a Prayer.
In her new memoir, Tamara Yahia writes about how that launched her career as a child star in Argentina until she moved to California at 13 and later realized the damage of having been sexualized as a child.
Also, we talked to author and poet Layla Motley, who gained critical acclaim for her debut novel Nightcrawling, published when she was 19.
Her new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, follows three young women navigating pregnancy in a post-Roe v Wade world.
And TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new documentary Dear Miz, a revolution in print.
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Terry has our first interview.
I'll let her introduce it.
Today's guest writes, there is absolutely no doubt that I was 100% sexualized as a child.
She's referring to when she was a preteen child star modeling herself on Madonna.
You probably don't know her name, Tamara Yahia, because she grew up in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, and moved to America in 1995, when she was 13.
The move was initially traumatic because she was about to become an even bigger star in Argentina after landing a role in the cast of a new TV show which became the Argentinian equivalent of the Mickey Mouse Club, and it was a big hit.
But she was denied that opportunity because her family had already planned to move to the US.
Argentina's economy was in a downturn.
The middle class was collapsing.
Her father's business had gone bankrupt, and the family was broke.
It was the second time the family moved to California.
This time, as they were in the Immigration and Naturalization Office about to get their green cards, they were nearly deported instead, because they'd overstayed their visa.
Yahia now lives in LA, which has been at the epicenter of President Trump's efforts to deport people who are here illegally, and some legal residents have been swept up in the process.
Tamara Yahia has written a new memoir called Cry For Me, Argentina, My Life As A Failed Child Star.
It follows her tumultuous life, moving with her family from Argentina to California, then back to Argentina, then back to the US in an eight-year period of her childhood.
She also writes about what it was like being Jewish in Argentina.
Yahia has given up on a music career, but she's channeled her creative energy into writing.
She was a writer for The Onion and Funny or Die and has written for several TV series, including Apple TV's Acapulco, the Hulu series, This Fool and several other shows.
Tamara Yehiho, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much, Terry, for having me.
When I was reading about your early childhood performances in Buenos Aires, on your way to being a childhood star, I was very worried about you.
First of all, things weren't going well for you.
You were biting people.
You were getting scolded for trying to be funny by pushing boundaries.
A child psychologist diagnosed you as having developmental issues.
Your parents had sent you to a Hebrew school where the afternoon was all in Hebrew in Talmud study, and you didn't understand Hebrew.
Then you saw a Madonna music video of the Isla Bonita.
And you decided to dance and lip sync to Madonna's Like a Prayer in your Hebrew school talent show with rabbis and audience in the audience and lots of parents.
So I want you to describe your performance, what you did for your choreography and what you wore.
Well, this was all my decision.
I was the creative director of my performance.
I wore a American flag t-shirt that went down to my knees.
It Put Velcro strips along the sides of the shirt so that once the choir hit in Like a Prayer, I could rip it off, kind of like strippers do in the movies.
I don't know how I knew that back then, but I mean, I guess I had seen it somewhere.
And then underneath Terry, I was wearing a black garter belt, which Babala had also taken in for me.
I was like 11 maybe.
And a little nude, like these nude colored shorts and a nude bra that made me look naked.
Now, you can imagine the horror in people's faces.
I describe it in the book as it looked like they were about to get run over by a train.
But I was on top of the world.
So describe your choreography and the knife.
Well, I had a knife in my hand, just like Madonna did in the Like a Prayer music video.
And in the music video, she uses it basically to put stigmata in her hands.
Yes.
I had no idea what any of that meant.
I mean, being raised Jewish, I didn't even know about Judaism, to be honest with you.
I was just copying this amazing, confident woman that I had seen on MTV.
So I pretended to slice my hand.
Then came the shirt tear off.
I did a lot of crawling on the stage like Madonna had done in her Like a Virgin music video.
And I was just copying my idol.
Your parents didn't know what your routine was going to be because you wanted to surprise them.
What was their reaction?
My parents, they were not horrified, to be honest with you.
They saw me expressing myself.
And sex had been so normalized in my household that they were in awe of me.
Which tells you a lot and, you know, I don't blame them for it nowadays.
I feel like I would do things differently when I have kids, but they just saw it as me expressing myself.
But then again, Terry, just to...
I spoke to my dad after he read my book and his comment on it was I thought all of the moves that we did and all of the change he said.
I thought it was fun for you.
And at that moment, I just started weeping because I said this –
I don't think there was much emotional intelligence on their end.
And I think they just I don't know, it's so tough to talk about it, but I think they didn't see us as humans in a way, me and my sister.
What do you mean by that?
I think my parents may have been too focused on themselves and too much was permitted.
And they just saw us as these, you know, extensions of themselves that were on this fun ride along with them.
Well, parenthetically here, I'll mention that for family fun, your grandmother would drive the whole family to the Buenos Aires Red Light District to look at the sex workers and how attractive some of them were.
How old were you and what was that experience like?
And do you think that connects to the larger story that you're telling here?
Yeah.
I mean, I must have been when we first started going.
I was like eight or nine, you know, and it was a family outing which to me felt totally normal at the time.
And I write that my grandfather would sit in the front seat and he was going through chemotherapy and like almost dying at this point.
And he would just sit and we would wave and I would wave and blow kisses and everything.
Not until now do I realize how insane that was.
Well, your grandparents I think this was on your mother's side met at a brothel where your grandmother was a cook and your grandfather was a patron.
And he tasted her cooking and they got married a few weeks later.
And you said that like most of the people who worked at the brothel were Jewish.
Yes.
And I did some research on this and it blew my mind Terry, because there were a lot of women from Poland, you know, back in the pogrom days, that would get brought over to Argentina and they would pay their debt, their immigration debt, by working in brothels.
And my great-great-aunt was one of those sex workers, and that's how my grandma ended up there.
Sex work and sex has been normalized in my family from generation to generation.
My father lost his virginity in a brothel.
His uncle took him.
And I thought it was crazy, but he was like, that's just what we did.
You got to the point, you say, where you started to lock eyes with men and you worried if they didn't look at you sexually.
How did you interpret those looks as a preteen who didn't really understand what sex was yet?
Like sex was normalized in your family, but that doesn't mean you really understood it or saw it or knew what it was.
No, and it felt so horrible.
It was so confusing.
That's like the main thing I could say about it was just not understanding these feelings of you know, a mixture of sexuality and like horniness I describe it as in the book but guilt and shame.
And yeah, I would lock eyes with men at restaurants.
Sometimes they would be with their families.
And I feel like I exuded sexually like a darkness as a kid.
But it's just too hard to put into words because I didn't understand what it meant.
And it was a combination of having Madonna be my idol.
And it was her at her in her erotica years, which were the most sexual times.
And my family.
So it was a perfect storm.
Was there anyone who tried to protect you from yourself and from the men?
No.
When did you realize how inappropriate and potentially dangerous your situation was?
Not until the past couple of years, and I'm 41.
I was going to lie and say I was 40, but I'm 41.
I started really really doing therapy, and it wasn't until I wrote this book that.
So it was a combination of those two things.
I had never, for many years, I never even talked about the fact that I was a child star.
So sitting down to write this really let me analyze that darkness.
And you know what's crazy is my editor, I didn't write about any of the creepy stuff.
I just wrote about, you know, me doing the dances and stuff.
And my editor said, let's go back.
There's something missing here.
This wasn't right.
And it took three tries until I really nailed the emotion of what that men's gaze is and all of that being sexualized part.
Because I tend to make things just be trivial and humorize.
Humorize?
Is that how you say it?
That's a good verb.
I'm not sure I've heard it before.
I like it.
Let's pretend like it is.
But yeah, and so it was because of having an amazing editor that it served like therapy.
And I went back and I really looked at what that meant.
Why do you think it took you so long?
It was survival mode, I think.
I may have not been ready to see things until I wrote this book.
I think I just needed the time. to be prepared and strong to understand how difficult it was.
And it's crazy because the moment I did understand all the trauma and see it was when I changed my mind about wanting to have kids.
I'd never wanted kids until I wrote this book.
Yeah, that's how you start the book, explaining that 95 of you didn't want kids, 5 did, and then the 5 wouldn't let go of you.
What changed your mind?
I was scared that I would not be a good parent to a child because of the upbringing that I had.
I'm getting emotional, but I was scared that history would repeat itself.
And after writing this book, I knew there was no way that it would repeat itself.
Because, Because I am an introspective person, because I was able to release all the trauma via my writing, and also because I have an amazing partner.
So I think once I let go of that, I knew I would make a wonderful mom.
We're listening to Terry's conversation with writer Tamara Yahia.
Her new memoir is called Cry For Me Argentina.
More after a break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
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Your family decided to move to the U.S. because the family business went bankrupt.
The whole middle class was collapsing and they needed to make a fresh start and thought that California would be a better place to try to do it.
So your family went to California on a tourist visa, I think with more luggage than tourists typically bring.
Yes.
And your father kept entering what was known as the green card lottery.
Can you explain what that is?
Yes.
So every year the United States government grants I'm not sure let's say 40000 visas to specific countries.
And if you win this lottery, you and your family get naturalized.
So we won that.
What do you have to do to enter the lottery?
I think you pay.
If I remember correctly, you pay some sort of sum of money and you turn in.
It's like a letter or like an application.
It's pretty simple.
I'm not sure.
We may have had an attorney help us with it once we won.
So the family finally won.
At this point, though, you were undocumented because your tourist visa had expired.
So let's talk about the expiration period before your father got the go-ahead for the green cards.
What could your family not do or not do legally?
We couldn't travel for one.
We couldn't leave if we wanted to come back.
I believe my parents had driver's license which luckily, they had obtained on our first trip here, when it was, everything was easier to obtain.
But we didn't have social security numbers, so we couldn't or I was too young, but they couldn't work.
So I just think I remember, even as a kid, I was in constant fear of even crossing the street when the light was red, because I would get, you know, picked up by the police and deported.
So imagine being, you know, 13 years old, starting middle school, getting my period, all of that.
And then on top of it, this fear, underlying fear.
When you were scared and you worried about what was going to happen, what was the movie that you played in your head about how that would work?
Oh my God, terrifying.
So I would.
I remember my parents would leave for work at three in the morning and I would stay with my little sister who's four years younger.
And I would dream that they would, you know, get caught and deported, and that me and her would get put into an orphanage or, you know, get sent to a creepy man.
I...
To take care of us.
I had also watched this movie called Freeway with Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland.
And in my mind my parents were going to get deported and me and my sister would be sent to this creepy man like Kiefer Sutherland in that movie.
It was so terrifying.
I would just not sleep at night.
So in the book you say you actually did have.
Your parents did have a lawyer, an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish lawyer, who told your family that they just had to show up and fill out the paperwork and they'd get the green card.
So you were in the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The family was there.
I think you were there, right, with your parents?
I was there.
Yeah.
Tell us what you were told.
So we went in so happy because this lawyer said it's going to be a piece of cake.
It'll take two seconds.
And I remember sitting down and just some guy immigration officer who you know didn't even look at us.
And I remember them just like avoiding my dad's gaze, just flipped through paperwork and just immediately said no, you were here, undocumented for however long.
This doesn't qualify you.
There was something else that I didn't put in the book, where my dad had been sponsored through work, which is the reason that the deportation didn't work.
I'm unsure as to that.
But they basically deported us on the spot because the lawyer wasn't present.
And I remember my mom collapsing on the floor of the immigration building and just having a straight-up panic attack.
And in my mind, thinking, what does this mean?
Being kind of happy because I was like, I'm going back to Argentina.
My grandparents are there, but still horror and confusion.
So what did your lawyer do when your parents contacted him?
And he came and, you know, turned things around.
Oh, my God.
The guy was a maniac.
He came in and started pounding on the doors of the immigration offices.
Like, I don't know how he didn't get arrested.
And he was like, had a stained shirt with like mustard and ketchup, I remember.
And he was like, you wrongfully deported this family.
I will burn the place down and I will get, you know, every news outlet I know.
He was a character here.
And so they let us back in.
And we had a different person this time, who was you know read that the other part of my dad having a sponsor or whatever and was like, oh yeah no no, no.
That was a mistake and basically undeported us on the spot.
It was an absolute roller coaster.
It's not right for a child to feel that way.
If you try to project that incident into the present, what do you see?
Oh, my God.
I can't put into words what is happening right now.
And I it brings up a lot.
And I have to say that I am.
I'm lucky, I have fair skin.
You know, like I don't feel like I would be targeted.
But although who knows, but I think of my parents, you know, visually targeted parents.
I don't think so.
I don't think I would be racially profiled.
No.
But then again I think of my parents driving food trucks in downtown LA in construction zones with, you know, thick accents, and they're driving around with their passports right now.
So, God, it's just so horrible, Terry.
So, you know, I was reading in The New York Times their description of what's happening in L.A.
They said that there are parts of LA and Latino neighborhoods where it looks like the COVID shutdown.
People are so afraid to like take public transportation or buy anything from like a Latino market or Latino, you know, truck.
They're afraid to be seen on the street.
And so a lot of the streets and shops are like empty.
Yeah, I can see it.
I also live downtown.
It's unrecognizable.
And it's a city that's already hurting after the fires and COVID.
So it's devastating.
Did you witness any of the demonstrations, the National Guard?
Yeah.
I live like two blocks away from where everything happened.
And it's weird because I would put the news on for comfort, which is like exactly what I didn't.
The opposite of what I should be doing.
They were probably just narrating what was going on two blocks away from you.
Totally.
There was one moment where I was like, there's our apartment, like watching it on the news.
But I don't know, I felt it's crazy because I was in a fight with my parents during this whole time.
So we weren't speaking.
And I was just following their locations on my phone and seeing them going to work, like in the middle of where all of these ICE raids were happening, and just being like what a time to not be on speaking terms with my parents.
Everything is fine now.
But this is what happens when you write a book, too, and you process so much stuff.
It's like I needed a break from them.
Because you were processing your relationship with them and how they did or didn't protect you over the years.
Oh, yeah.
It's been really intense, Terry.
I'm like...
All of this immigration stuff, my book, writing this book, processing stuff I'd never processed.
And on top of it, doing IVF because I'm trying to have a kid.
And pumped with hormones.
So I am something else right now.
So now you're trying to have a child.
What do you want to do differently than how you were raised?
Like do you have this whole plan in mind of like, what kind of mother you're going to be, which will, of course change, because nothing goes as planned.
But do you have like a plan in mind or a vision?
Yeah, I think there's, just without going into it too much, because there's so much will change, like you said, but I just want this child to feel safe.
It's very, very simple.
I did not feel safe, and...
They will not be an extension of me.
They will be their own person.
And again, I have the right partner.
I'm certain.
Tamara, it's really been fun to talk with you, even though part of what we talked about was very traumatic.
I don't mean the interview is traumatic, but we were talking about trauma in your life.
But it was really a pleasure to talk with you.
And thank you for coming on the show and for talking openly about your life.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Wow.
This is a pinch me moment.
Tamara Yehia speaking with Terry Gross.
Her new memoir is called Cry For Me, Argentina, My Life as a Failed Child Star.
HBO has a new documentary, also streaming on Max, about the formation and legacy of one of the more influential and controversial magazines of the 20th century.
The magazine was called Ms., and the documentary is called Dear Ms., A Revolution in Print.
Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.
Ms.
Magazine was launched more than 50 years ago with a test balloon sneak preview issue that had to break even if the magazine were to keep publishing.
HBO's new documentary, Dear Ms.
A Revolution in Print.
Takes an inventive approach in explaining what made this particular publication and its contents so unusual and meaningful.
The documentary is divided into three parts, each telling a different aspect of the Ms magazine story.
And each is told by a different director, each with her own specific perspective.
One major theme of the documentary is that the women's movement, like many political movements, contained activists from all over the spectrum.
Giving voice to three different voices in Dear Ms. is one way to reflect that.
But another major theme of the documentary is how important and groundbreaking it was to identify and publicize concerns that women had in common.
In the program's first part, director Salima Karoma examines the genesis of Ms.
Magazine.
Original staffer Letty Cotton Pogrebin remembers the meetings that led to the articles in that first issue and even the magazine's name.
We assigned, we got that manuscript, we edited, we put into production.
It was a blur of glorious hyperactivity.
And, you know, we were still batting around a title.
We had a lot of maybes.
Maybe gonna be Sojourner, Lilith, Bimbo.
Sister was thrown out because it sounded like a nun's magazine.
But Miz, it's a synthesis of Mrs. and Miz.
Miz was the all-purpose business nomenclature for women whose marital status you didn't know.
Miz seemed to me perfect.
A feminist magazine aimed at and run by women, from today's perspective, seems like an obvious, even brilliant idea.
Back then, though, it was seen by many as a threat or a mistake or both.
Take, for example, ABC News anchor and commentator Harry Reasoner.
We put 300000 copies out on the newsstands and hoped that they would sell over the course of eight weeks.
See if people are interested, see if maybe people might use the subscription card.
Maybe it'll get a little news.
The first edition of Ms., described as a new magazine for women, is at hand, and it's pretty sad.
There's so clearly just another in the great but irrelevant tradition of American shock magazines.
I was talking to a couple of other chauvinist pigs over the weekend, and one of them wanted to bet.
I'll take five issues and under, he said.
You take the field and I'll give you two to one.
He got no takers.
Reasoner was wrong, and later in the documentary, he's shown admitting as much.
Magazine founder Gloria Steinem, on the other hand, gets to look back with no small sense of pride.
I have to say, I think we were smarter than we thought we were.
I feel good about this issue.
A lot of these articles could still be relevant.
The first part of Dear Ms recounts the early feminist voices championed by the magazine, such as Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for president of the United States, and Alice Walker, published in Ms before she wrote The Color Purple.
Part two, directed by Alice Gu, examines the magazine's reach and impact.
The first editor of Ms.
Magazine, Suzanne Braun-Levine explains how its 1977 cover story on sexual harassment gave name to an issue that soon became a central part of the national conversation.
Three years later, it was the basis of the 1980 hit movie 9 to 5 starring Dolly Parton as a secretary rebelling against her chauvinistic boss.
If something doesn't have a name, you can't build a response to it.
You can't talk about it.
You can't rebel against it.
Get your scummy hands off of me.
Look, I've been straight with you from the first day I got here.
And I put up with all your pinching and staring and chasing me around the desk because I need this job.
But this is the last straw.
In the movie 9 to 5, women get even.
In real life, many women can't afford to confront the boss.
But women are reporting sexual harassment, more than ever before.
The minute it had a name, things took off and changed.
And in Part 3, director Cecilia Aldorando looks frankly at some of the issues that divided Women in the Movement and even Women on the Magazine's staff.
One of them, Lindsay Van Gelder, recalls the sexual revolution that was brewing in 1972.
Not only was Ms.
Magazine released that year, but so were such attention-getting porn films as Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door.
I was the last generation to grow up without porn.
I was born in 1944.
Porn really hit the mainstream in 1972.
It was the golden age of pornography, they called it.
Porn chic.
You thought it was kind of liberating to go to these porn films.
The magazine dealt with that issue and others in the decades since in ways that were anything but consistent or unifying.
But the complexity is what makes this documentary so intriguing.
And, from the very first issue, what made Ms.
Magazine so distinctive.
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University.
He reviewed the HBO documentary called Dear Miz, A Revolution in Print.
Coming up Layla Motley, author of the bestselling novel Nightcrawling, published when Motley was 19.
Her new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, centers on the lives of three young mothers in the Florida panhandle.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
Support for this podcast and the following message come from Fisher Investments.
SVP Judy Abrams explains the importance of education and resources when it comes to planning to, and through, retirement.
It's interesting.
People put money into their retirement accounts for years, but they have no idea what's supposed to happen when they have to start taking money out.
When I'm speaking to a prospective client for the first time, one of the ways that I work to establish trust is to listen to them.
Is there anything we should know about their spouse or their children, or plans to move or their health?
Our job is to get the full picture.
Then we can take a look at their resources and see if we can improve their situation.
It's far more comprehensive than just managing the money.
When clients realize that we have the resources and the competence to be able to handle a wide array of financial questions, they know they're in good hands.
My guest today is author and poet Layla Motley.
She earned critical acclaim a few years ago, at just 19, for her New York Times bestselling debut novel Nightcrawling.
Now she's back with a new novel that follows three young women in the Florida panhandle as they navigate what it means to be a mother today, when reproductive rights are being rolled back across the country.
Motley found herself writing and rewriting The Girls Who Grew Big in real time as abortion laws rapidly shifted, forcing her to adapt her character's lives to this new and uncertain reality.
Motley says her goal as a writer is to offer new perspectives on what it means to be a young woman in contemporary America.
At 16, she was named Oakland, California's Youth Poet Laureate.
Her 2024 poetry collection, Woke Up, No Light, wrestles with girlhood, reparations, and desire.
She also co-wrote and starred in the documentary short When I Write It, which was featured in the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival.
And her best-selling debut Nightcrawling, was inspired by real cases of young women in Oakland who were assaulted and exploited by police.
Layla Motley, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me.
You know Layla, as I was reading this book, I kept thinking how, over the last 50 years, young women have kind of been taught that motherhood doesn't have to be their ultimate aspiration.
Teen pregnancy rates in this country are, I believe, at an all-time low now.
And your novel actually puts young mothers at the center, right in the middle of these conflicting realities.
How did you think about that tension as you were writing this book?
I think we've been taught that teen pregnancy is a moral issue.
And I wanted us to question the idea that young parenthood is anything but a circumstance and urge us to look differently at the ways that we look at mothers in general.
I think that the world and our culture has so much criticism and judgment for any and every choice that mothers make, from how you birth to how you feed your baby, to how you put your baby to sleep, to what school you put them in all of these things that are only compounded when we look at young parents who are almost judged and demonized for the very acts of their parenthood.
And as we see declining rates of teen pregnancy, we're taught that that is a win, which in some ways then implicitly implies that young pregnancy and parenthood is a failing.
And it's not.
I want to talk a little bit about the characters in this book.
So 16-year-old Adela, 18-year-old Emery, and then there's 20-year-old Simone, who already has twins and she's, at the beginning of the book, pregnant with her third child.
Is there something in particular about those ages 16 18, 20 that felt like time periods in a woman's life that you wanted to explore?
The teenage years are so packed and all-consuming.
Everything feels big.
And so I wanted us to get a spectrum of young girls, who some maybe have a little more hindsight than others.
I wanted us to understand how much can change for us between those ages.
I know a lot changed for me between 16 and 20.
And I think the way that we, We think about young people as a culture, as almost as though we own them until they're 18.
And the very act of pregnancy and parenthood is a marker of choice and independence.
Layla, one of the things you do is immerse us in this book with your characters' inner worlds.
We are reading this from the private conversations they're having with themselves and it feels deeply intimate.
And I want to talk to you a little bit about your process in finding these voices, because you have three singular voices that you're telling these stories through.
And for Nightcrawling.
I actually heard that you spent time journaling as the main character to deepen the voice of the main character in that book.
What was your process of finding the characters' voices in this novel?
I also did journaling for each of the characters in this book.
This was a process because I was creating three first-person perspectives of girls in similar demographics, from the same place, going through very similar experiences.
But each of them has a different perspective and a different kind of foundational sense of the world that changes the way that she interacts with pregnancy, with parenthood, with life.
I wanted us to understand that there are a lot of ways to be a good mother, and that teen parenthood isn't monolithic and it doesn't look just one way, and that it exists across race and across class and across geography.
And so I did a lot of work to kind of create their individuality, And a lot of that is how we see them interact with the same scenario very differently.
You were named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland when you were 16 years old.
And you actually wrote this really beautiful poem about the city.
Can I have you read the poem?
It's called Love Poem to Oakland.
Dear Oakland.
Last night I got off a plane, rolled my neck, felt it crack and said honey, I'm home.
Said, baby, I ain't gonna leave you again.
This is my love letter.
This is my spilling over waxed mural of a song to you.
My prayers to the Panthers, to the Everett and Jones on MacArthur that smells so good.
Got that rubber chew of a home too far, that sweet spice of my city.
Oakland, can I cradle you like my daddy cradled me?
Hold you tight, say baby I got you.
Tough love, say fix your face for I'll fix it for you.
Fix these streets for I'll fix them for you.
Where did all the color go?
Where did all my sweat-laced church-clappin' hand-in-out pies on high street men go?
My sisters with their gloves on, with their afros out, don't care if they're afraid of us, cause we got these streets, we got this lake, we got Fruitvale Station.
Dear downtown, what I gotta say to make you love me?
What I gotta do to strip uptown back?
If I can't have this hair, this skin, then I don't want no 5 coffee, no 10 Cobb salad piled up with all this talk about how we been criminals, been scared straight, so they can feed us back our shame.
East Oakland, I know you ain't forgotten about me.
I know you've been waiting for my tongue to click gums to throat, to lungs, scream till the bay dries up.
I know you've been sitting on your heels for me to find the key to the Alameda detention hall.
Tell your kids that mama hasn't forgotten about you, hasn't left you chained from your childhood.
Mama been at work, been waiting to set us free, to give us back our city.
Oakland, I'm talking to you.
Diamond to Laurel, to Uptown, to Chinatown, to Fruitvale, to Foothill, to Temescal, to Eastmont, to West Oakland.
We're ten steps from home.
A mile we race in.
They've been displacing our bodies, our words, our letters.
Been trying to tear us apart, but I know you've been loving us.
Been whispering our history.
Black Panthers to White Horse to Bart at night.
Oakland, we're fighting home.
We're clawing home.
We're coming home.
That's my guest, poet and author Layla Motley, reading her poem, Love Letter to Oakland.
Layla, tell us a little bit about this poem.
It's an ultimate love letter.
It makes me curious, the story behind the writing of this love letter.
Did it start with you returning home from a trip?
Yeah, I think I wrote this right after I went to Detroit to visit my family.
Because your father's from Detroit originally.
Yeah, and a lot of my family still lives there.
I was 15 when I wrote this poem and it's been a good eight years, so I can't entirely tell you the story behind it, but I think it came with this initial reckoning that I think a lot of us do as teenagers when for the first time we're interacting with people outside of our families, outside of our homes and And trying to make sense of where we're from and what we've been given and what we want for ourselves.
And, at the same time, like learning how to both love and criticize a place.
People, your childhood, all of these things.
And so...
I think that I came back home from this trip and started writing this poem about what it means to be from a place that is constantly changing and that doesn't always love you back.
And how to love a place and how to care for it and how to fight for it, when we've been told that it is undesirable or only desirable in relation to us, the influx of whiteness and wealth.
And so there has to be a simultaneous criticism of the harm that has been done to us and then the harm that we continue to perpetuate within our communities, and how we can hold each other accountable and show up for each other differently.
Where did you learn that?
Because so many people don't really come to that idea.
Look, I'm saying so many people, but I'm going to say me, okay?
Didn't really come to these ideas and understanding of your relationship with your hometown until much older in age.
Were these conversations you were having at home?
No, no, they weren't.
I mean, Oakland is a really specific place and has a kind of tradition and history and legacy of resistance.
And growing up in a time where Oakland was rapidly changing so much displacement, so much like loss I had to cope with that on a daily basis and understand like that there is power in fighting and in trying to maintain our homes.
And I think that that very much ties into this kind of legacy of rebellion.
I grew up getting to be in conversation with former Black Panthers, and I read a lot.
And I think that that definitely helped me kind of process it.
But I think it wasn't until I left home really briefly, I think, just even a couple months of distance, to kind of reevaluate and understand and choose my home.
And since then, I've kind of had to create an adult relationship with the city.
Is it true that your grandma was part of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, back during the civil rights era?
She was, yeah, in Detroit.
What stories did you hear about that growing up?
I heard a lot of stories about the Detroit Rebellion.
My dad grew up in the 60s in Detroit and he used to tell me this story about how, during the Detroit Rebellion, he lived in my grandmother's house and they would sleep on the floor to avoid the bullets coming through the windows.
I think my family has a strong history of resistance.
My grandmother was also the head of the Nurses' Labor Union in Detroit.
And she did a lot of work around caretaking and activism and organizing.
And there is definitely a legacy of that as well as art and writing.
Your father also is a writer, a playwright.
So you would watch him as well in his creative pursuits.
What do you remember about that?
Yeah, my dad worked a lot when I was very little, and he would come home really late at night.
And we lived in this six-bedroom apartment, and so me and my brother would be in our room and we'd wake up when he got home and listen to his keyboard start clacking, and that's when he would start writing.
I got to grow up with someone who was deeply passionate about writing and about art and about doing it for the love of it, regardless of the outcome.
And I think that that was incredibly important to my understanding of the importance of the practice of writing and of doing it daily and of loving it for what it is and not for what it gets you.
Right, because is it true that you wrote six books between your first novel Nightcrawling, and this current book that we're talking about?
Yes, that is true.
When I hear about someone working at that level it shows kind of a deep love for the craft, but it also suggests that you're creating first and foremost for yourself.
Is that true for you?
Yeah.
I mean, until Nightcrawling and even during Nightcrawling, I didn't show my work to really anyone.
And so it was entirely for me.
And that was, I think, a really sacred experience that you don't really get to recreate once you start publishing.
I worked full time and I would wake up at six in the morning and I would write, and I would write on the bus to work and I would write on the way home and write.
I had a very consistent practice from a young age that I think helped me get to the point that when I started thinking of what I wanted to write after Nightcrawling, I knew how to write anything at any time, regardless of creativity or time.
But I struggled with figuring out how to write with the idea of a reader in mind.
How did you get over that?
How did you cross over?
I wrote six books and I threw them out.
Oh, you threw them out.
So will we ever see them or?
Probably not in that form.
I imagine that maybe one day I'll return to some of them, but I'm not super precious about my work.
So if I don't feel like it is clicking or that I'm in the right place to tell a story, well that I will leave it alone and I'll start over.
When you're someone writing for yourself and like constantly doing that practice.
How does it feel then to have your work consumed in such a spectacular way?
Because your first novel is a bestseller.
You're chosen on Oprah's book club list.
I mean, you're like right in the fire.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you have to understand the dissonance too of the amount of change that happens between 17, when I wrote Nightcrawling, and then 1920, when it was coming out.
I felt like an entirely different person.
I was an entirely different person and a different writer.
And it was almost like having my 17-year-old diary published and memorialized for the rest of my life.
And I think that's something that all writers have to cope with is like our work is a representation of the time in which we wrote it and once it came, comes out, it doesn't belong to us anymore.
And there has been like a lot of work in me to like respect the person who wrote that book and really see it as a representation of a 17 year old's mind.
And I think that's something we don't often get to see.
Is motherhood something that you aspire to experience?
I am one of those people who's like wanted to be a parent since I was a child, because I am in a queer relationship.
I kind of have the blessing and burden of parenthood being a very intentional choice.
There's not going to be an oopsie.
And so I think, in some ways, that like means that I spend a lot of my time thinking about, like intentionality around parenthood and what it looks like to become ready to truly be, be selfless and to have your life orient around another person and to know that there is a certain amount of loss and death of self in becoming somebody's parent.
And I want to be as ready for that as possible, while also knowing that We're never ready and we're never prepared.
And parenthood is unpredictable and you don't know what kind of kid you're going to get.
But I do think that the most important thing is being ready to be accountable to that child for the rest of your life and for the rest of theirs.
Layla Motley, thank you for your time and thank you for this book.
Thank you so much for having me.
Layla Motley's new novel is called The Girls Who Grew Big.
Fresh Air Weekend was produced this week by Susan Yakundi.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
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Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner and Anna Bauman.
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With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.
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