“Tender Excavations”: an Interview with Tiana Nobile (Poetry ’17)

2017 poetry grad Tiana Nobile was recently interviewed for Apogee. Read an excerpt of the interview below:

Tender Excavations: Retelling Origin Stories in Adoption Narratives

Leslie Sainz: Cleave is no stranger to poetic erasure—the poem “The Stolen Generation” features an erasure of the Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869 and the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886, and the book presents and manipulates documents that pertain to your transnational adoption, including a letter requesting that you, as an infant, be baptized. In reading and rereading these poems, I was reminded of Solmaz Sharif’s essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” and her discussion of erasure as “obliteration,” as assuming the role of the state. In the context of transracial and transnational adoption—a system built on abandonment, separation, and trauma that is hallmarked by not only the removal from one’s birth country but oftentimes one’s birth culture and language—I’m curious about how you arrived at the decision to employ erasure on actual source materials. How did your sense of agency shift when you applied your adult hand to documents that blatantly pointed to your inability to consent?

Tiana Nobile: Historically and politically, it’s true that erasure most frequently equates some form of violence on behalf of the state. What, then, does it mean to enact an erasure in the opposite direction? “The Stolen Generation” is named after the countless aboriginal children who were forcibly removed, in some cases literally kidnapped, from their families and given to white Australian families for adoption. This horrific practice is not unique throughout history (you might have heard about the mass grave of Native children, some as young as three years old, that was recently discovered at a former “residential school” in Canada), and its purpose was to essentially erase aboriginal life and culture from Australia. This is genocide, possibly the most egregious form of erasure. Reading the legislation that made these acts legal was illuminating and appalling; they’re called the Aboriginal PROTECTION Acts for fuck’s sake! It felt necessary to call attention to that hypocrisy in the poem.

I’ve been a student of erasure for a while, and I’ve learned so much about the power of subversion. Solmaz Sharif’s Look and Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager are two groundbreaking examples of this. To manipulate the language of the oppressor in order to disrupt that version of the truth and uplift a previously silenced perspective is a powerful political act and one that really spoke to me as I began working through my own archive of records.

Erasure is particularly special because it points to so many layers: the original text, what is missing from the original, and the newly constructed, unearthed narrative. To be simultaneously immersed in a white family, stripped of any cultural ties to my country of origin, and for the reflection in the mirror to be an ever-present reminder of this migration and loss—I think of my body as a physical manifestation of palimpsest. In Cleave, erasure provides me with a poetic space to reckon with the erasure that happens as a result of adoption. It enables me to re-frame the stories I was told. I can finally uncover what is submerged within the language of my paperwork, give it a voice, and demand visibility.

Read the rest of this interview here: https://apogeejournal.org/2021/08/03/tender-excavations-retelling-origin-stories-in-adoption-narratives/