Chelsea Zhao
Staff Writer
E. Nina Jay is a Chicago-based writer who uses poetry to bring awareness to violence against women and girls. From her identity as a Black lesbian and a survivor of incest and rape, she uses words to tell truth in her poems of self-discovery and revelation.
She spoke at a writing workshop for sexual harassment awareness through the Wellness Center on March 24 in Crown 330.
Jay warmly introduced herself and exuded a welcoming energy. Her expressive bright eyes look determinedly and she is a confident figure with a story to tell and utters each word with exactness and a pure feeling.
She does not avoid her past of sexual assault trauma when she was 19, and the 10 years of silence after, but instead addresses it with a courageous frankness.
In 2021, Jay published “De-stoning: Migrations away from the outpost,” and in 2019, she published “Bricks Blood & Water.”
“One of my poems talks about when I took my power off of his [her perpetrator’s] body, how weak he looked. All that power I thought he had, how dangerous I thought he was, how I was looking at myself reflected on him,” Jay said. “And once I took myself back off from him, and he was just the thing he was. Somebody who felt he needed to do that.”
Jay said she struggled with the fear of violence decades after, but now she recognizes it as a source of power and strength.
“Like I’m an emotional amazon: I love to feel,” Jay said. “And you know, the fact that there were feelings I was trying not to feel, that I was living a life trying not to have a certain emotion, that I could be using as power.”
She showed an artistic image of a lion, half flesh and half stone, as a symbol of her recovery and realization of power.
“When I saw this picture, though, everything becomes clear to me, and that’s when I knew that that was what was happening to me: I was allowing myself to turn into a building,” Jay said. “Even this process right now is so many stones falling from me. And I can see flesh again. And the things I’m uncovering, that I almost let myself die like this, blows my mind. And I thought I was whole,” Jay said.
In the writing workshop, Jay read poems of her collection. After a powerful reading of her poem Lion King/Lion Song about confronting trauma, Jay paused and asked, “Can you feel my power? Can you feel yours?” to her audience.
DU faculty and students entered the space to journal and share their thoughts around a circle. Her poems inspired thoughtful discussions on power, fragility, empathy and violence.
When asked about her advice to others experiencing trauma, Jay pondered and clarified advice as implying a form of hierarchy, encouraging others to seek the validation of the self.
“And in one of those expert spaces, I learned and I had to unlearn that I was never broken. Nothing ever broke me. What he did it was not a reflection of me, it was him. He was the broken one.”
