Danielle Legros Georges is the author of several collections of poetry, including Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti–Congo Story (Beacon Press, 2025), and the translator of the anthology Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets: Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant, Maggy de Coster (Zephyr Press, 2024). Her honors include being named a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France’s Ministry of Culture and Boston’s second poet laureate. She is a professor emerita in the MFA creative writing program at Lesley University and lives in Boston.
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Poets.org: What was the process for arranging the structure and order of Three Leaves, Three Roots, which crosses the Caribbean to the Congo and moves back and forth through time?
Danielle Legros Georges: The poems in this book were written across many years. When it occurred to me to arrange them into a manuscript, both chronology and geography served as organizing principles, though I think chronology was a more prominent approach. I attempted to balance moving into time and looking back, not unlike the advancement of the Sankofa bird in Akan art—and tried to appreciate the ways in which history shapes our current moments.
I also felt it was important to start with the pivotal moment of [the Democratic Republic of the] Congo’s stated independence in 1960, which came accompanied by its call for Francophone teachers and workers; before examining the national conditions in Haiti, which created the pressures for people to leave their country.
These dynamics, of course, were not disconnected from larger geopolitical and Cold War concerns that began to make themselves felt earlier in the Americas in the 1950s and involved the Cuban Revolution, referenced in a couple of poems.
Poets.org: In several of the pithier poems, such as “In Kinshasa,” space surrounds the language of normalcy—that is, depictions of people trying to live within the oppressive circumstances created by colonialism—to a restrictive effect. What do you think is the role of space and redaction in docupoetics?
DLG: I think documentary poetics often make evident the politics of historical moments and the ethics of poetic construction. The how of poetry-making can be foregrounded with such strategies as space and redaction.
In “In Kinshasa,” I wanted the simplicity of normalcy, as you mention, or a normal life, to stand even as Haitians dealt with the newness of their surroundings; and the instability of their circumstances in the Congo, and that of their families back in Haiti.
Theirs was, I feel, a determined act to not allow precarious circumstances to consume them. The space between the lines of that poem was a bid for a certain kind of breathing, and living, to occur. Finally, for me, space can operate as a way to acknowledge the unknown, what is undocumented, unavailable, inaccessible—even as we work in the archives.
Poets.org: Many poems in this collection speak about the hopes and failures of pedagogy and the complex, intersectional, and often painful experiences the speaker has as a teacher. What are your thoughts on the comparison of literature to “homework,” and how do you hope readers will interact with your work on the Haiti-Congo story, which does instruct us about a particular socio-historical context?
DLG: A number of the Haitians who moved to the Congo [then, Zaire] in the sixties and seventies worked there as teachers—and were deeply concerned about their students and the systems in which they functioned. Many practiced what might be called critical pedagogy, that is, new—anti-colonial—ways of being in relationship with their students and surrounding societies.
Such liberatory methods, because they challenged the status quo, could make life uneasy. Moreover, acquiring new knowledge, about the world and about ourselves, often forces us to reconsider long-held beliefs and stances—and can be uncomfortable even as it is emancipating.
I hope that in discussing pedagogy, and by making a book of poems that brings forth a little-known story about education (and other subjects), I’m participating in some helpful knowledge production, especially when it comes to global Black educational exchange and recent Black transnationalism.
Among Haiti’s narratives are two familiar and persistent ones that disproportionately shape outside perceptions of the nation: First, Haiti’s successful 1804 revolution as the source of inspiration for antislavery, anti-imperial, freedom-seeking peoples the world over; and second, Haiti as “the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere,” a perpetual site of need.
Not often mentioned in the discourse about Haiti are its universities and its long traditions of higher education. Its specialists and pioneers have tended to be viewed as exceptional and not as emerging from (and responding to) structures extant in Haiti.
The Haiti-Congo story presents us with a group of Haitians that exercised agency in greatly constrained circumstances; a group that benefited from Haitian institutions and pushed against their compromise, and that operated through the gears of UNESCO and the Congolese government. Most were deeply sympathetic to the cause of Congolese independence and to the Congolese they worked with. They also represented a loss of human capital for Haiti.
At the same time, like many diasporic Haitians, they economically supported loved ones and relatives in Haiti with ongoing remittances. They were deeply committed to their country of origin and willing to write—however difficult or complicated—their individual narratives, a collective story of collaboration, and a new Haitian transatlantic narrative.
Poets.org: Why did you decide to focus on translations of letters in Three Leaves, Three Roots? What information do you think is conveyed through letters that may not be in other documents, like formal reports, and how does the epistolary form intersect with poetry?
DLG: I’m always struck by the freshness of letters, how quickly their firsthand accounts—inscribed in the now of their writers—pitch us into particular time periods, allowing extraordinary windows into those times. A number of the letters I read and translated helped reveal their writers, including my parents, to me in ways I’d never before known or understood them.
Their everyday concerns, the broad structures they were negotiating, the money they were sending back home to Haiti, the care for their children and family members, their complaints, their travels—all came into sharp focus. Moreover, that they were not alone in these experiences, and that they belonged to a closely knit group of Haitians who would later lay the groundwork for Boston’s current Haitian community (the largest in the United States after Miami and New York) made me understand that theirs and there was a story to be told.
The letters I read for this book tended to be personal, between spouses, partners, and family members. Their tones, density—and especially details contributed to the imagery we often find in moving poems.
The ability of some letters to convey their content in gripping ways across decades, countries, and oceans makes their power comparable to that of some poems for me.
Poets.org: What are you currently reading?
DLG: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals and Aminatta Forna’s The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion.
The ability of some letters to convey their content in gripping ways across decades, countries, and oceans makes their power comparable to that of some poems for me.
These aren’t books of poems, but I think each is deeply poetic in its writing and wide-ranging in its scope.
Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?
DLG: It’s hard to choose from so many compelling poems on the great resource that is Poets.org, including ones former students that I have read and analyzed.
Here are some chestnuts and new poems I appreciate very much: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Paul Robeson,” Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love,” Donika Kelly’s “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings,” Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” Nâzim Hikmet’s “On Living,” Danez Smith’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” and Wisława Szymborska’s “Nothing Twice.”
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“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.
