Hartford native, now an author, comes home
Shanta Lee to talk about race, gender, history at library
A Hartford High School and Trinity College alum, visual artist, journalist, and writer is coming home to talk about the questions that her work poses on the topics of race, gender, and history at the Albany Branch of The Hartford Public Library on Saturday.
Hartford native Shanta Lee will be in conversation with freelance teaching/ performing artist, Alycia D. Jenkins, who also will discuss her book, “The Laughing Elephant In The Room.”
Along with speaking about connections of race, gender, and history within their works, Lee and Jenkins will talk about whether historical damage is truly able to be corrected and if so, what does the correction process look like.
Albany Branch Library’s Community Hub Manager Deirdre Brickhouse said that they are excited about Lee and Jenkins’ conversation, as she said that their voices are providing mirrors for young adults by allowing them to see themselves reflected in stories and characters that resonate with their own lives.
“Lee & Jenkins being from or based in Hartford deepens the relatability within the Upper Albany community. This discussion will allow for readers of all backgrounds the opportunity to participate and delve into the lives and perspectives of Black women, promoting empathy and fostering a deeper understanding of different cultures and experiences,” she said.
Lee is the author of two books :“Ghetto claustrophobia: Dream in of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues,” and “Black Metamorphoses.”
Lee said growing up in the city was a complicated experience for her, as she dealt with trauma and a period of homelessness.
She describes her life path as “zigzagged,” as there were many things Lee said she was left to figure out on her own on her life journey – including figuring how to pay for college and managing a lot of care for a brother who is autistic and unable to be on his own, despite growing up in a two-parent household.
“I grew up in a home where (the word) can’t was never part of the vocabulary. (The word) ‘can’t’ was like a curse word. You’re never allowed to say can’t in this house. There was no question that I was going to college, but at the same time – there was no one to talk to me about how is this going to work out? Like, who’s going to pay the bill afterwards? And so there were pieces and things that I had to kind of figure out along the way… and so, there were a lot of things…standing in the way,” she said.
However, Lee said school was her saving grace that provided her freedom to fantasize and dream.
“School was liberation. No, I was not a popular kid. Some of us have these stories and there is something about my internal world of fantasizing a lot. I fantasized about being a glamorous adult…in one of my journals, I remember writing some things down that made it into the first poetry book, which is centered very much on home, family, and breaking out of it … I remember writing down I wanted love, freedom, money… Looking back, those are tangible and intangible. I didn’t know what the building blocks were for those, but like I was always kind of looking,” she said.
She began to keep a journal at the age of 12, as it was the only place where she could express her thoughts.
Along with school, she credits her support system, which includes her mother’s sisters, whom she calls Mama Sheila and Mama Christine, and her Uncle Frankie. She also has several other family members whom she credits for having helped to soothe some of the wounds she faced in her childhood, as an adult.
“They are now super, super, super supportive of my work and I’m very, very grateful to that,” she said.
After graduating from Hartford High School, she attended Trinity College, where she studied Women, Gender, and Sexuality, as a way of answering her internal questions of how she got to where she is and how she wanted to think about herself in the world.
It also allowed her to begin her journey of creating a path in the world, as Lee said she knew that she wanted a different life than what she saw around her.
Lee said that she still has a complicated relationship with the city, yet she acknowledges that it has been an amazing teacher that helps her to think about bigger questions around the concept of family and how to create family.
Newest book
Lee said her newest book was created based on her love for fairy tale legend and Greek mythology.
She said that she remembers reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses book over and over again, thinking about the bigger picture that the work was posing around the nature of human desire, the nature of hunger, the nature of power and imbalance.
“What does it mean when one group has a hunger that can’t be satiated? Within the context of imperialism, what do some of these myths look like? And then what would my mythmaking look like? With the help of reaching into different kinds of African mythology that spans across those countries, and that continent, It’s wide spanning,” she said.
She hopes that during the conversation these questions and thinking about history will cause participants to sit with these bigger questions and seek out for themselves what their own tools and pathways are, along with thinking about their own metamorphosis.
Lee also hopes people reading her work will encourage all community members to to live in audacity, especially young women who may be Hartford High School students like herself navigating their own life journeys.
She also hopes that her work will encourage others about the importance of choosing your people.
“The moment that somebody is not curating or helping to feed your soil, don’t be afraid to pull out the weeds. I hope that that sense of daring comes out of my work. At least that’s my sincere hope,” she said.
“All my work, whether it’s journalism, whether it’s exhibitions or the photography or writing across different genres, all of it links to an intense hunger and curiosity for looking beneath the surface, inspiring and facing that back out to people so that if nothing else, they get to ask their own questions, they get to develop their own relationship, their own inquiry, and their own curiosity,” she said.
The Conversation of All the Shades of Black: An Exploration of Race, Gender, and History will run 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.