AC Interview | Zedeka Poindexter
Photo: Dana Damewood
We recently sat down with Zedeka Poindexter, Amplify's 2022-23 Public Impact Grant recipient to talk more about the scope of her work. Zedeka was awarded a Public Impact Grant by an external selection panel in the amount of $10,000 to develop new, public-facing work that interrogates the disparities Black women confront in the healthcare system. Over the course of her two-year grant term, Zedeka will conduct and transcribe interviews with Black women to gather stories that shine a light on how their lived experiences, bodies, and voices are often minimized, manipulated, and ignored when seeking medical care.
Zedeka will transmute these stories into a layered choreopoem that uses sight, sound, touch, and feeling as tools to center empathy and understanding. The finished piece will have a local run and dedicated performances for audiences of Omaha-area medical practitioners. As an integrated piece of her staged work, Zedeka will also make her process simple to replicate for other communities by developing an interview guide, transcript analysis toolkit, and production roadmap.
Listen below or, if you’re on the go, visit Amplify’s Anchor page to listen on your favorite podcasting service.
Transcription
Interviewer: Peter Fankhauser
Interviewee: Zedeka Poindexter
Date of Interview: January 11th, 2022
List of Acronyms: ZP = Zedeka Poindexter; PF = Peter Fankhauser
[ZP] My name is Zedeka Poindexter. I am an Omaha born and raised artist. My primary genre is poetry and spoken word. I've been involved with the Omaha spoken word community since the late 90s, so it's been a good long run for me. I also, by professional trade, in the daytime work with Big Pharma. I've done everything from insurance support, to being a drug representative, to helping people understand their insurance benefits. And honestly, I am where I am because I am a child of Omaha—a person who works professionally in Big Pharma and a poet. I’m in a place in my life where I’m a whole person, not just Big Pharma by day and an artist by night. It's all of me, in all parts of my life. I'm in the right place.
[PF] Your background as a performance poet and your experience in the health services industry are coming to this very poignant juncture with your Public Impact Grant project, which we'll talk more about in a minute. Before we dig into that, I'm also curious to know about how you work with multi-layered sensorial experiences in your performance. Could you talk more about how you incorporate touch, sound, taste, smell in your work?
[ZP] Absolutely. For a lot of years, and even still, the poetry and spoken word pieces that I'm asked to talk about the most use food as a metaphor to talk about community. The most popular one is where I'm talking about peach cobbler. In talking about peach cobbler, I'm talking about family connection and class indirectly in that work. If I’m on a stage, obviously I'm not serving everybody a piece of pie, so how can I use my face, my voice in the language and words I used to write the poem to build a shared connection? For me, spoken word it's about getting a group of disparate people and connecting their core memories, in a way, so that in that moment, we're all in the same space experiencing the same things. Sometimes it's invoking the term “butter,” because “butter,” when you mention it, people have this very specific connection to the sweet and the salty and what it does. Some communities of people have a very specific way they feel about cilantro, whether you're the person who thinks it tastes like soap. There are all these ways that you can talk about food to build a shared connection that gave me an opportunity to learn how to transport those things to my audiences, while also sneaking in cultural or parable information at the same time.
Honestly, it fits very much into where I'm at right now because I'm able to start talking about things like the physical feeling in your skin of being in front of a doctor, or the taste of medicine and how that taste, or the memory of the taste, affects how you feel about medication therapy. If you ask someone from the South about a drug called “three sixes,” you will get a whole story. Terrible, right? So, I love the fact that I'm a poet who built my life, my bread and butter, on talking about food because it allows me to leverage that sensory information into the next place I go as an artist.
[PF] It’s such a powerful way to trigger memories and associations. The smell of a doctor's office is something that’s ingrained in a lot of people’s memories. Maybe that's a good segue into talking a little bit more about your Public Impact Grant project. Can you describe what it is that you're working on in general terms?
[ZP] Sure. I’m starting by doing some research to see what exists in the academic world about the conversation about how people interact with medical professionals. And then beyond that, I want to use that information to build an interview guide that I’ll use to talk to Black women about what drives their attitudes toward the medical industry. What experiences drive those attitudes? And when you start talking about those things, there's a lot of data, for lack of a better word, that you get. You get stories, you get quotes, you get feelings, you start to see communal trends when you're talking to different women who don't necessarily know each other, but who tell similar stories.
In an academic context, you would take all of this, put it in a paper, publish it, and present it at a national convention. What I want to do is take all that information and turn it into a play, a choreopoem, actually. Since I'm a poet by trade and I build group pieces that incorporate different voices, I'm going to take all these voices and all of these themes from the women I interview and turn them into a very long choral piece that can be performed on stage. The power of that is I'm honoring their stories. I'm also putting it in front of other people so they understand that their specific story is not something that is specific and unique to them, but also exists in other bodies they can talk to. I’ll also organize showings for medical professionals because I truly believe that if you implant an experience that reinforces this humanity outside of your diagnostic tools of the person that you're looking at, it doesn't just change that doctor or medical professional in the moment. It means that 10 years from now, they have this memory that says, “Maybe I should ask a question or two more; maybe I need to take a minute and listen differently.” That's the power of this project. It's not about the moment. It's ingraining information in people that they take forward to make everybody healthier because we're thinking and talking about things differently.
[PF] What do you think it is about this time and this place, Omaha specifically? What makes this the right time and the right place to deepen our understanding of how systemic disparities within the healthcare industry affect Black women specifically?
[ZP] I think it starts with the fact that we're living through what may very well be year three of a global pandemic. If someone would have asked me pre-pandemic if I knew and believed that there were health disparities, I would have absolutely said yes. There's a host of stories we can point to as Black women, especially when it comes to things like Obstetrics and Gynecology, that show they absolutely do exist. But then a global pandemic happened and there was something out there that couldn't be explained away as a failing, or lack of action, on the part of a specific community. Everyone was affected. Everyone was dying. Everyone needed to start having conversations about their health in different ways. And what happens when you put everything under that spotlight, all of a sudden, these glaring disparities become bigger because it's not something you can explain away. You have to talk about how things have been happening to people for potentially generations, and the ways that affects how we move through the pandemic, because they don't trust the people who are giving them information. It matters that our history, prior to the pandemic, got us to a point where we didn't necessarily have conversations we needed to have. It shined a light on the fact that we weren't getting the care we needed even to get to a baseline. As a Black woman, my health outcomes are different than that of a white woman in my same age bracket. That is just true. You need to decide how to communicate that message to everyone effectively. If we're going to be here, and we're going to try and figure it out, why not really dig down into what's causing the problem? More importantly, what conversations do we need to have to start to address it and honor bodies like mine?
[PF] One of the things that I find super interesting about your project is the fact that you're using a choreopoem to explore this subject matter and to look at the intersection of art and medicine more closely. Can you talk more about what it means to work across those two sectors and what that will look like in the context of your project?
[ZP] Absolutely. Sometimes when I talk about this thing, I think people get the impression that I am anti-academia. I'm not. I am, at my core, a huge nerd. I am all about reading this information, trying to figure it out, and looking at theory. That means something to me. I have my favorite academic theories. I am that kid. That said, it's a different thing to have something exist in a journal that is not accessible. It's not like you're going to go to the barber shop, or to your doctor's office, and see the National Academy of Medicine journal sitting on the table. That's not what's out there. The reason the intersection of art is important is that it takes some of the same information which might exist in a paper, or in a journal, or in a conference and it puts it in front of people in a way that is easy to access, understand, and discuss. So I'm not going to talk about third persona theory, I'm not going to do that. But what I can do is say, this is a message that's out there; this is how it is received by the black women who are being affected; and when you talk, if you're not addressing these people, you're excluding them from the conversation. And that matters. So how can you make sure you modify the conversation that you're having, not so every message is perfect for every population, because that message does not exist, but how can you start tailoring conversations to people with real fears and concerns to ensure that they are being uplifted? And also, how do you transport that information to their providers, so they understand how to be better providers of care to all populations? Art has a way of building a shared experience. It's about getting us in a room and getting rid of our preconceived notions and our barriers and having a really good time looking at something that is artistically beautiful. It’s also about the potential to transport information that matters to everybody in the room. That can change lives.
[PF] Your love of theory and your background in research also comes to bear on this project because you're going to be conducting research and doing interviews with Black women whose lives have been changed, sometimes irrevocably, by our healthcare system. Can you talk more about the process of gathering those interviews, gathering those stories and your approach to stewarding and honoring them?
[ZP] The first thing when I was entering into the process--this sounds tangential, but it'll come back around--I knew that it was important to pay myself as an artist. I think it's important to pay artists because that's how we continue to receive art. We can't treat it as something that people sacrifice to make other people happy. It needs to be part of our design, paying artists. But also, in making this art, I'm asking people to show or share potentially traumatic stories. So, another one of the ways that I'm honoring these women is by paying them for their time. We're getting to a point in our society where there's trauma porn everywhere. We've got 24-hour news cycles, we've got Facebook stories, we've got all these things on YouTube, where there's a lot of sharing and people aren't necessarily honored in the way they should be. I want to make sure that I am taking these interviewees and paying them for their time because that matters.
I’ll also have talkbacks with interviewees so, as I start writing this process, I have a group of people I can have a discussion with in the read-throughs so I can make sure that I'm hitting the messages properly, and honoring them, because I am but one Black woman's voice. I need to make sure that I'm honoring more than more than that. It's also about making sure that when we get to the point of this show going up, that people who are really passionate about this, and have had experiences but never thought of themselves as artists, can be part of this cast. What does it add when their voices are included, not just textually, but they’re physically in the piece? What does it look like if I have a talk back afterwards? There's going to be some feelings. This will bring up traumas in the truest sense. What does an after-show talkback that includes women who were interviewed look like when they say, “Look, this is not just a story. This is my life and this how I moved forward after that.” All of these are ways that I honor these women. These are not just random subjects in a study. These are my neighbors. These are women who I've worked with. This is my family. These are all different reflections of the community that I love. So, I'm honoring them by including them the entire way and paying them for their time, which matters.
[PF] Another important piece of the work is the idea that this process can be easily replicated and distributed to other communities who can tailored it to their own specific needs. You’re creating an interview guide, transcript analysis toolkit, production roadmap, and other tools so others can replicate this process. How do you think that that conceptual underpinning is going to influence your workflow and the day-to-day tasks that are involved in creating this work? The second part of that question is, ultimately, you're going to be giving a degree of control or authorship when this project is adapted by others. How does that influence or change the work?
[ZP] To start talking about the first part of the project, I think, it might make things move slower in a way that makes things move faster later. If say, I'm working with an archivist to document this process, visually and textually, that makes me stop and think about things and intentions and what and who I'm including in the beginning. But it also means later, I don't have to rehash that conversation because I've already started getting myself in the mindset of communicating this information in a way that is clear and impactful. Since I am building this so it will be replicated in other communities, it is incredibly important that throughout this archive process, that I understand this is not about ownership. Yes, this will be my script, but this isn't about ownership. It's about leadership. It's about building a process that can transform to fit other communities. Because my experience doesn't speak to everyone. Even if we did this with a different group of people in Omaha, if we spoke first-generation immigrants, it sounds different. It looks different. That's okay. I want to tell my story. And if I can use the framework of my story to help someone else tell theirs, and by extension, that means the next time I go to the doctor, things are going to be easier for me, or when my daughter has to be in control of her health care in 15 years, she can have a better experience, then that's the end goal. So, I'm okay with releasing that into the universe. Because I know that when it's out there, it can have ripple effects that do come back.
[PF] That's a wonderful way to frame it. We talked a little bit about how creative work can position itself to respond to systemic challenges. When you factor in the ripple effect, how does the work potentiality grow, expand, or change?
[ZP] I think a lot of us, as artists, have been taught that art is fine, but art is something you do in addition to something else. I am a drug rep who is a poet at night. But in all of that, there is no break. I am all of those things everywhere I go. Poetry affects my day job just as much as my day job affects my writing. That is just true. Health disparity organizations need to think about building a community environment in which all of us have this discussion. We are peers and I am someone who's communicating information to you. If we start talking differently about targeted communities, and how we talk with targeted communities, that matters going forward. I don't see why there shouldn't be large scale projects between arts organizations and teaching hospitals because there are ways that those two types of organizations can work together to have a tremendous impact. I'm hoping that I can start to model that in this particular instance, and that other communities will model it going forward.
[PF] Are there resources that cultural organizations and art institutions could provide to offer more meaningful support to artists whose work is made in response to systemic challenges? Are there things that art institutions could do better to shore up those artists?
There’s a kind of poetry called ekphrastic poetry. I think that's the right word. Don't quote me. I love poetry, but this is not the place where I'm perfect. Basically, you have a picture, and you look at that picture and after looking at it, you create a piece of art. Let's say, an arts organization and a hospital decided to get together, and they have a series of a series of images of how people are affected by COVID in their day-to-day lives, or even in the ICU. What happens if we start having people write about that? What does it looks like, if you have a conversation about COVID and treatment, and you bring these images and say, “Let's talk about this. Let's write down your response to this. Let's see where we are and what we feel. Once we're there, maybe we can figure out a path forward that gets us both to the end of this breathing and upright.”
There are ways that they can happen. I think through this process, I'm going to learn a lot more about how the institution of medicine works because I work in a very small subset with pharmaceuticals. Maybe I will have different ideas about how that will work going forward. I don't expect to be the writer I was in 2020 at the end of this project, I don't expect to be the human I was in 2020 at the end of this project. You cannot do this much reading and this much research and spend this much time conducting these interviews and analyzing this information and these stories without changing. I imagine if you ask me the same question in six months, I’ll have a different answer. I'll know more and be feeling differently because I've been spending more time immersed in it.
[PF] I'm really looking forward to that evolution. I'm looking forward to what the next two years holds. For now, your project is still in very early stages. Can you talk about what your initial steps will be toward this big undertaking and how people listening can get involved and where they can find you?
[ZP] A lot of this is reading. Right now, there's a lot of books. I have a website, which is www.zedekapoindexter.com. That is the easiest way to find things and for people to reach me. Trust me, if you send an email through that site, I’ll see it. Please email me. It's great and it comes directly to my phone. I'm going to start posting my reading list, so people can follow what I'm reading. That's part of the archival process. Another thing I’m starting to do is have conversations with community stakeholders. It's having conversations with the University of Nebraska Medical Center. It's having conversations with other artists, and it's also starting to have conversations with women who have heard about this project and want to be interviewed. So that's kind of where I'm at right now, as this project evolves from its infancy. My website is going to be the fastest way to track the progress. As I start interviewing women, there will be a secondary page on my website dedicated to this project so people can go to a very specific place, sign up to be interviewed, see archival material, watch videos and see a reading list. All of those things will be available through that website.
This is the work that I've chosen to do, but I recognize that there's a community out there. And if they're engaging with a website that gives me insight and gives me strength, that really matters. The website is definitely a great place to start. Other than that, there will be a show sometime this year where I start doing preliminary work from this, just to make sure that people see where I am and see how I'm responding to the work. I'll include other people from the community so we can start to have this conversation in a small way prior to the big show happening in 2023 / 24.
[PF] You're wonderful. Thank you so much for taking some time to talk about it with us today.
[ZP] Thank you so much for inviting me. This next two years is going to be magnificent. I'm exactly where I need to be and I know exactly what I need to do to get the process started. I am well covered by the universe, and I recognize that I have blessings.
[PF] Is there anything else you'd like to share before we sign off here?
[ZP] If you're interested in other pieces of my work, on the Union for Contemporary Art’s Facebook page, there is a video of a show I did recently that really was rooted in the idea of working with the five senses and what it sounds like to communicate that in a virtual world. If you want the sensory kit, there's a few available down the Union for Contemporary Art. And if you have questions about the process, or if you want to be in conversation about what's next, please reach out to me at www.zedekapoindexter.com. I am always available and always happy to talk.
[PF] And the work you referenced is titled “Sense of the Pandemic?”
[ZP] Yes, it’s titled “Sense of the Pandemic” and the full video is available on the Union's Facebook page.
[PF] Perfect. Thank you so much again.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Zedeka Poindexter is a North Omaha-born writer and performer. In her work, she builds a historical record through poems and essays that draw on all five physical senses to connect with readers and listeners. Raised in multi-generational homes by descendants of the Great Migration, she draws on issues of race, class, struggle, and joy to fuel her work. Zedeka has worked with the Nebraska Writers Collective for over ten years to provide writing and performance education in schools, community organizations, and correctional facilities. As Slam Master for the Omaha Poetry Slam, she guided local artists through generating new work, stage performances, and fundraising. She is the first woman, and the only woman of color, to be named Omaha City Poetry Slam champion. As a member of Omaha’s poetry slam team, she qualified for semi-finals at the National Poetry Slam. Only one other team achieved this honor in its 18-year history.