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Of course, personal narratives are rarely that neat.
Do I remind you of what you lost?
Do you hate or do you lust?
It also forms the backbone of the record with two empowering tracks, Demons and Snakelife.
As soon as I wrote it, I knew that it was part of the larger story ofThe Returner.
Eve Was Black, Snakelife, and Demons live as their own little sub-trilogy.
And I knew that I wanted to have another song that went even more explicit.
Im not a religious person, even remotely.
Im a hopeful agnostic, I would say.
And theres a satisfaction in playing with that imagery as a literary equipment.
I will spend the rest of my life decolonizing my mind.
And Eve Was Black is very personally satisfying to have written and very empowering.
Its kind of an open letter to people suffering from the sickness of white supremacy.
You have this deep understanding of history in your songwriting.
In what world does a blond, blue-eyed Jesus seem reasonable when he was a Jewish man from Bethlehem?
It takes the fangs out.
Theres a lot more raw rage and sorrow in Eve Was Black because its never just one thing.
My abuser was also my adoptive father, the only father figure in my life.
And he became monstrous because of the monstrous abuse he had suffered as well.
Ideological abuse is some of the most insidious of abuses to overcome.
An unfortunate number of people are sleepwalking through it because theyve been gradually, by degrees, radicalized.
Theres no being neutral its impossible in this time.
I signed up for it; I knew what I was doing.
But it does still take a toll.
In the third verse of Eve Was Black, you begin narrating a lynching in the song.
Lynching hasnt stopped in America, and in fact, its been ratcheting up again.
And then there are the ways that we psychologically lynch one another every day.
This intensity of anti-Blackness is ongoing in so many different ways.
Things like people assuming that you are being violent as a Black woman if youre simply having a boundary.
And theres an internalized self-hatred that occurs.
I talk about that in Demons.
So, what can I do?
I wanted any listener who heard that song to feel the intense discomfort in that moment.
And I wanted them to come back into the circle in the end, where I switched to French.
Thats the other moment on the song that stands out to me.
All of these things are present in us at all times.
Those things coexist paradoxically within us at all times.
That coda is an invitation back to the circle.
Its saying, You may have done horrible and monstrous things, but nobody is a monster.
There always, I think, has to be a way back to the circle.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
