This month, we're spotlighting women whose professional and personal contributions help shape our collective future — women who are making points we should all listen to. The people you will read about are remarkable, but this is not a contest or a ranking. Rather, we present women whose contributions, just like those of so many other people of all genders, warrant our attention. Listen up.
photograph by lawrence mathews III
At 22, Nubia Yasin perfectly embodies the inventive Black arts renaissance gracing the city of Memphis today. Beyond that, she epitomizes the very idea of the renaissance person. With formidable skills in poetry, fiction, video direction, and community engagement, she wears many hats. And all of those hats, she might note, are proudly cut from African-American cloth.
As she puts it, “Zora Neale Hurston's been a huge influence on me in the way she uses dialect, being unapologetic in the way she uses language. She doesn’t care if you — as a white person, or non-white person, or non-Southern person — don't understand what the characters are saying. She’s like, ‘Figure it out.’ And Toni Morrison, whose novel The Bluest Eye changed my life, talked about the difference between writing Black stories for a white audience and writing Black stories for a Black audience, who she knew would understand. Neither of those women were pausing every couple stanzas or paragraphs to explain what just happened.”
“Because I’m a Black woman, all the intersections that I exist in don’t allow me to be apolitical. I think I have always been a person who’s attracted to the work of building community.” —Nubia Yasin
Such an approach aligns perfectly with her role as chief storyteller at the newly minted Black arts nonprofit Tone, formerly known as The CLTV. If that's an unorthodox job title, it captures the spirit of radical innovation that sets Tone apart from more longstanding arts organizations, and it dovetails neatly with the fundamental creative pursuit that is at the core of what Yasin does: writing.
“It informs everything,” she reflects. “I'm multidisciplinary for sure. I do visual art, I do installation work, I do film, but the writing portion informs all of it. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read. And I’ve been writing since I had the motor skills to hold a pencil. Now, not all of it was good, but I’ve been doing the practice since I was very, very small. So it’s not really a thing that has ever been separate from me.”
Some of her most celebrated words can be heard in the video of her Memphis TEDx Talk in February of 2020, where she addressed “the effects of gentrification on poor Black and brown neighborhoods,” using both her poetry and the photography of longtime collaborator Lawrence Matthews. “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do,” she sings before reciting her work, evoking a primary focus of her presentation: those typically well-meaning white developers and activists who may unwittingly open gentrification’s floodgates.
That moment captures Yasin in a nutshell — in the presentation’s mix of poetry, images, and music, and in the unflinching cultural politics of her words. “Because I’m a Black woman, all the intersections that I exist in don’t allow me to be apolitical,” she says. “I think I have always been a person who’s attracted to the work of building community. I grew up in a house where we talked about Malcolm X. My dad literally grew up in Chicago with Fred Hampton’s son. So this idea of activist work was never separate from my life.”
Her mother’s background politicized her as well. “My mom was an orphan that grew up in Somalia. That’s one reason Warsan Shire is one of my favorite poets. She is of Somali heritage, and I saw myself in her and the stories she was telling.”
Storytelling comes naturally to Yasin, one reason her current job title sits more comfortably with her than her previous label of community engagement director. And it’s essentially what she’s doing when working in film and video, mediums she’s been exploring with increasing deftness since 2015. This year has seen the release of several music videos she co-directed for Matthews, under his stage name Don Lifted, notable for their intentionally unsettling imagery.
And only months before the pandemic struck, she scored big at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, receiving a Documentary IndieGrant for Okbih [Cut Up]Den, “about Black sexuality and the digital space,” and winning the Black Filmmakers Pitch Rally for her proposed feature, See Jane Run, “a dark comedy about drugs in poor Black life.” Work on these two proposed projects was slowed by Covid-19.
“We’re trying to get those projects ready,” she says. “We’ll pick back up with them soon.” But, as ever, the immediate, ongoing project is more writing. “I’ve been adding to and taking away from a body of work for the past two years, that I’m hoping to finish soon. And what that will turn into, fingers crossed — Inshallah — will be my first book. But we will see.”
