The big interview: Foluke Taylor
Therapy Today, October 2023

Helen George: The theme of this year’s Black History Month, ‘Saluting our sisters’, is about honouring the achievements of black women who are often the forgotten heroines. It is also a time for us to amplify their voices and challenge the systems that oppress them. I think this is a perfect month to be saluting and honouring you, Foluke, and I would like to start this interview by talking about your new book, Unruly Therapeutic: black feminist writings and practices in living room. What an incredible, important and permission-giving book that I am sure has inspired many, as it has me. What inspired you to write it?

Foluke Taylor: : I think there were several moments of inspiration that led to the creation of the book. I was reading a lot of black feminism at the time, and in my regular writing practice I draw on whatever I am reading as writing prompts. I was also completing research for an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, and I had chosen poetic inquiry as a method for the dissertation and was drawing on the work of Christina Sharpe, specifically her book, In the Wake: on blackness and being. I also used music and images as prompts. Out of that practice the paragraphs emerged, and somewhere along the line these paragraphs became a book. I think the inspiration crept up on me and gathered momentum, which was also fuelled by my continued infuriation, disappointment and hurt by the lack of address in therapy, trainings and literature. Therapy trainings often assume a liberal universalism, but despite the use of a universal ‘we’, ‘we’ as in ‘black life’ is never there. As we read, study, and teach material, we are always having to translate it to our own lives and experience, and think about what that would look like from a black perspective, filling in the gaps.

HG: I totally agree, Foluke, always having to try and fit into these mainstream counselling and psychotherapy theories and concepts that were never about us.

FT: Find a way to fit in, or to manage feeling ‘thrown out’ of a text or presentation that completely ignores you, or perhaps to not even enter that space at all. Sometimes we can end up saying, ‘Well, that’s not a space that can take the shape of me as a black woman, so I’m going to stay away.’ Author Toni Morrison wrote about writing the book she wanted to read, and I asked myself a similar question: What would I have wanted to read? What would it have been like, while I was training, to have a therapeutic text that addressed me directly as a black woman therapist-in-becoming? This question was also part of the creeping inspiration and motivation for the book.

HG: You’ve mentioned Christina Sharpe and Toni Morrison – I am curious about how the words and voices of other black feminist writers, like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, influenced you. Were they also part of the creeping inspiration?

FT: Their words are important, beautiful and poignant. They might have written their words decades ago but they are still very relevant. I was also thinking about Sara Ahmed’s work on the politics of citation – that the more someone’s work gets cited, the more they get read, and the more they get read, the more they get cited. So there develops these kinds of superhighway routes that lead the way to certain, usually white male European, thinkers. We know that black women also write but are not so often cited, and sometimes not cited at all. As a result of that, those pathways are obscured, not clear, or become overgrown, and we have to find them again – as Alice Walker did with the work of Zora Neale Hurston, bringing a body of work back to life. It is not that any of the people I’m quoting are not known – they are known and bringing a lot of richness to many different spaces – but I really wanted to be part of supporting the life and visibility of their work. I hope that someone reading my book might follow some of these pathways and be led to somebody else’s words.

HG: That’s exactly what happened to me when I read your book. Although not a female writer, I was led to La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s words about their reasonings for using a lower-case b for black. I’m in that struggle now, trying to decide whether to use a lower-case ‘b’ or a capital ‘B’ and I was like, ‘who is this person? I need to look them up and read more of their words!’ In fact, so many of the people you quoted in your book I had never heard of and became curious about them.

FT: That’s so lovely to hear, Helen. It reminds me again how important it is to share the thinking. It means that we don’t have to keep doing the same thing over and over again. Imagine how many people are addressing this question now – capital B or lower-case b – thinking what will I choose? Well, lots of people have already thought about this. They have come to different conclusions – and, of course, it’s fine to come to a different conclusion – but if the work is not visible or accessible to us, then we keep asking the same questions rather than being able to build on them to find and make new pathways or places. 

HG: I recall hearing the term ‘unruly’ as a child, something a parent would say to a child about being unruly. What do you mean by it in the context of unruly therapeutics?

FT: It’s quite a familiar term used in black studies, queer studies and in black feminist scholarship, and also, as you say, a term used in childhood. When we were growing up the word unruly was a warning, like, ‘You better not be unruly.’ There’s also a 1980s song by the reggae band The Mighty Diamonds called ‘Unruly Pickney’. I remember it well. It was about following the rules so you can get along in the world and not make your mama cry.

In answer to your question, I use the word unruly to signal a disruption to what have become familiar and habitual ways of describing and understanding the world, in this case the therapeutic world. I am trying to disrupt what Jamaican novelist Sylvia Wynter calls our ‘narratively condemned status’ – a story of blackness as a lesser-evolved, sub-human or even non-human condition. In this narrative, black people have been imagined and described in very limiting ways, in particular as somehow less evolved, as not naturally intellectual and not, in fact, the holders of knowledge unless and until we are ‘educated’.

Even when we are seen as having culture, this is not recognised, or treated with the same respect as knowledge. The disciplines that guide our study tend to also refuse our knowledge because they emerge from, and follow, the same narrative that has already laid out who knows and who doesn’t know what, in fact, ‘knowledge’ is. We need to refuse this and find other ways, as to stick with these lines is both to accept and continue the story, and have our lives and therapeutic practices inhibited and confined by its limits.

Before the book was published, someone had suggested that I use the word ‘unorthodox’ instead of ‘unruly’. The question for me is who says what is orthodox and unorthodox? How these things are defined cannot be separated from racism, ableism, misogyny, classism, patriarchy and, we must say, whiteness. When I speak of whiteness here, I am not speaking about white people, but rather what Bayo Akomolafe refers to as an ontological hierarchy – a hierarchy of beingness with people classified as white at the top and people classified as black at the bottom. Orthodoxy maps itself according to this hierarchy and all the lines and categories that define what is superior, valuable and best. The orthodox space is arranged accordingly and maintained through a certain epistemic violence, which insists that we know what knowledge is, we know what it looks like, we know who is knowledgeable and whose knowledge is valuable. And basically, it’s not you [black people]. So yes, I want to disrupt that and, yes, be an unruly pickney!

HG: Tell me about your journey to renaming creative writing as ‘creatique’.

FT: I did a three-year master’s course on creative writing as therapeutic practice. I loved having so much opportunity to write, read, play and experiment. There were also some difficult moments, and it was those moments that led to the creation of creatique. I noticed how some people tended to shy away from anything that looked like trouble. For example, in a workshop about trees, we were asked to think about what trees evoked for us. When death came up – trees chopped down to make weapons, and trees as sites of lynching – the person facilitating the activity became defensive and said that none of this was the tree’s fault. This experience led me to think about how writing about ‘nature’ can be a lovely, beautiful thing but can also be used – as anything can – to erase or make it difficult to speak of black life. Part of the attraction of creative writing is its capacity for expressing beauty and joy. But we still live with racial capitalism and antiblackness, and contend with histories that are not histories, as in a past that’s not really past but living in the present and haunting us. I am interested in what writing can do here to help us stay with the trouble. For example, how might writing help us to do what author Resmaa Menakem says is required, which is to develop the bodies that have the capacity to stand the charge of race, or as Eugene Ellis writes, to have the race conversation?

When I was researching in the field of therapeutic writing, I found lots of literature about the use of creative writing and poetry therapy, including references to working with people who have been individually traumatised. There was very little literature however that addressed how we could think about creative writing and its potential for liberatory therapeutics, practices that could meet oppressive structural conditions in a transformative way. I am interested in how quickly distress caused by structural conditions of dominance and inequality gets framed as a personal problem or issue, and this was where the idea of creatique was born. It is in some ways ‘critique’, but I also didn’t want to play into a binary idea of right or wrong. Creatique is more like creative writing that makes room for the shadow, the unspoken and the unspeakables, and does not shy away from asking difficult, because unsettling, questions.

HG: You have a wonderful way with words. The book is a blend of poetics, memoir, theory, all mixed in together. What made you write it in that way?

FT: One of the books that gave me the permission to write in this way is called Ready to Burst, by a Haitian author named Frankétienne. The book is about him and also not about him. Some of it is autobiography, some parts fiction, and other parts poetry and speaking to the history of Haiti. Frankétienne uses the term ‘spiralism’, which he describes as being about defining life at the level of relations. Everything can be included. It’s not about sticking to a particular genre, because that is a separating of relations. Reading this book did something in me, and I was really fascinated by the way it was written and how it gave me a very alive – really rich – sense of what he was perhaps attempting to show.

HG: Tell me about how music influences you in your writing.

FT: Music has always been in my life. As a teenager there would be house parties every weekend. I found that as well as being something to look forward to, it also offered effective healing. Do you know what I mean? Music can make you feel better, and not just the music, but the whole experience of coming together to dance, eat, cook and often walk home together. There was something about that experience that provides a foundation for the work and the writing that I do now. And it continued. My partner comes from a big family of DJs and sound system culture. In 2003 we left the UK and went to live in The Gambia with no plan, which is wild now I look back on it – no jobs, nowhere to live and five children to care for. But what we did take with us was a sound system, which is how we lived for the first year, by playing the sound system at naming ceremonies and weddings. We used to pack an old Land Rover with amps, cables and microphones, tie two massive speakers onto the roof, and go and play

The through line of music has always been there. I think what I didn’t fully understand until possibly meeting black feminism later in my life and when I started to read and write more, was that music is also knowledge – that music, house parties and sound systems are also where I know from.

Katherine McKittrick is another deep influence for me. She is the one who asks this question – where do we know from? It’s an important question, not least because if you ask a therapist where did you learn to be a therapist, they are likely to give you the name of the institution they trained at. We might assume that all our therapeutic knowledge comes from only one place. However, I’ve come to realise that I know from a variety of sources, with music being one of those sources, while also not being a single source. To meet and listen to music is to be in a transdisciplinary space, meeting and listening to a range of different knowledges including what might be labelled history, sociology, politics, psychology and art.

HG: You write about black feminism as an instinctual wayfinding that you relied on in your development as a therapist. I was intrigued by that.

FT: I think most of us come into the therapy profession because we have experiences of being in a relationship that feels helpful in some way. Perhaps we find that we seem to know how to listen and be with people, or that people have known how to listen and be with us. My sense is that some of that instinct – what we already know about being with people – gets interfered with or maybe blocked, or even crushed by certain new information that we are asked to take on board in our training. This new information draws from a canon that is again largely white, largely male and which barely registers its own situatedness.

As I started to practise, I was mainly working with black women. As much as they appreciated the work we did, I felt some kind of block. I wasn’t sure how to bring together what I knew and where I knew from and I would question myself, like am I supposed to be doing or saying this here? Would my tutors approve? Am I a real therapist? What kind of therapist am I? Some of what was informing my practice came not only from my tutors but from women who had been teaching me in domestic and other ‘living room’ spaces about rituals, herbal medicines, nutrition and a range of spiritual and life practices. In relation to instinctual wayfinding, now I often use the term ‘natural mystic’ as a way of describing thoughts and sensations that occur and may be bringing useful information. As therapists we are tasked with making decisions about how to respond to these occurrences, to the thoughts, images and memories that surface.

The question for me is how to be yourself, with all the places you know from, in the room.

Many of us would think about this in relation to ancestral inheritance – life’s ongoingness. If we understand ourselves as just the current manifestation of this ongoingness, then we know that we are connected to who has gone before and who is coming after. This understanding fundamentally influences how we listen, and what we listen to. Instinctual wayfinding means taking this connection seriously, not allowing it to be diminished as simply ‘culture’ but placing it firmly in the realm of knowledge.

HG: In your book you write about making space and making room for other ways of knowing. I’d like to make space and make room for you here. What would you like everyone reading this interview to know?

FT: I would like to acknowledge that there are probably many therapists out there who choose to stay within certain lines, boundaries and disciplines because that’s what makes sense to them. I have no interest in persuading anyone. My message is for those who hear the signal, and I deeply appreciate all the messages I receive because this response tells me that there are many people who do hear the call. If something about this book gives you life, then I would imagine that there is something seeking to come to life through you. I hope that you will take that something – whatever it is – seriously and think about it as an invitation to creative practice of some kind. Writing is this kind of practice for me. I trust it but I also want people to know that it is a practice that exists in a constant state of emergence. People say, oh, what are you writing next? My response – I have no idea! Right now, I am thinking about possible collaborations with those interested in therapeutic practices that address not only the distress of individuals but also the conditions in which that distress occurs. To quote Bayo Akomolafe again, ‘The client is no longer the person sitting opposite you. The client is now the world that made the client.’ Or to think about therapeutics from black feminist and abolitionist perspectives: ‘What would need to have happened for the world from which we no longer need to keep recovering to be now?’ My hope is that this interview is a signal toward that world.

HG: Finally, taking inspiration from your book where each chapter ends with a playlist, I am wondering what your playlist would be for this interview?

FT: The first is ‘Domicile’ by my son, Hasani. His voice always opens my heart. The second is ‘Yield’ by Cktrl, a multi-instrumentalist who is also my son’s friend. They performed at the same gig earlier this year. It was beautiful. The third is ‘Unbeknownst’ by Matana Roberts, a saxophonist, singer, poet, writer, mystic, conductor – a truly transdisciplinary creative practitioner inspiring and also permission-giving artist. I saw her in concert recently and she played saxophone and clarinet, sang, conducted her ensemble, told stories, read poems and tarot cards, and meditated by balancing a peacock feather on her hand. The room was alive. The fourth is ‘Burn Progression’ by Meshell Ndegeocello. A part of the refrain, ‘Things fall apart, oh happy day’ seems to be speaking to the need for disruption, the need to shake things up. So that’s my playlist, with a bonus track for you, Helen – ‘Unruly Pickney’ by The Mighty Diamonds.

HG: Yes to being unruly! Thank you, Foluke.