Ancestries, Archives and Activism: Stetson MFA and Undergraduate Students Speak from Silence

Written by: Marissa Stanley and Natalie Reese McCoy

Poetry and art, while encouraging connection and challenging societal norms, is still seen as taboo. Some topics are seen as too graphic or too personal. Artists and writers often self-censor to avoid sharing realities that might overwhelm their audience, but sacrifice artistic honesty while they do so. There are blossoming writers who are tackling this issue head-on, and they are right here at Stetson University. Kendal Gailyard ‘29 is an undergraduate freshman, whose poetry and song-writing speak of generational issues and the struggle of cementing independence. Ayoola Olubukola Ogunyimika ‘26 MFA is a graduate student in her final year of the Masters of Fine Arts of the Americas (MFAotA) Program. Her mutli-medium artwork and her poetry tackle what it means to be a Nigerian firstborn daughter living in America, and fighting sickle cell disease. Lineage and history are foundational in her pieces, and she does not shy away from any difficult subject matter. The work of both of these artists rejects silence and actively resists the erasure of their unique voices. 

Kendal Gailyard ‘29

Kendal Gailyard is a first-year student at Stetson. While his major is currently undecided,  Gailyard plans a switch to Digital Arts with a minor in music. Kendal introduces himself as a writer, not just a poet – he details his work through creating songs, visual art and creative writing. Despite rejecting the title of poet alone, Gailyard has written poetry often since coming to Stetson. ”[I] started writing poetry as an escape from going into songwriting,” Gailyard said, identifying it as a creative outlet to avoid the vulnerability of music. Both his music and poetry depict themes of “resilience, connection, love and independence.” Having become a go-to creative outlet for him, Gailyard admitted that poetry “takes the most amount of reflection… it takes a lot of patience and a lot of honesty.”  His first year at Stetson has helped propel him toward a more confident version of himself, which resonates through his work. Gailyard  highlighted how poetry allows audience members to hear a “different story from each poet,” and he has not shied away from carving out a space for his story to shine. 

Breaking Free (Verse) from Generational Curses

Gailyard considers writing — be it through poetry, prose or songwriting — to be “basically, a conversation.” In one sense, writing itself is a visualization of conversation or speech; Gailyard is especially inspired by the idea of “writing as conversation” when he writes poetry. “What makes poetry such a powerful form of human expression is that it combines speech and rhythm patterns,” Gailyard said. In another sense, this combination of “speech and rhythm” in writing has the power to not only imitate conversation, but also invite others to participate in it.  “[Poetry] speaks to people in a bunch of different circumstances,” Gailyard said.

The process of imagining writing as a conversation has helped Gailyard to process his identity and independence while sharing about his family, culture and history. “[There] was a lot that I didn’t know before writing… After looking inward, and… recalling how I was born and raised,…  the things I might have kept hidden, or maybe the things that I didn’t want to look too deep into to resurrect… I could start learning to heal,” Gailyard said. Like many first-years in college, “I’m at a point in my life where I’m starting to seek… independence as I grow into being an adult and everything,” and, through writing, “[I’m] learning who I am and being confident with who I am.”

This has influenced Gailyard to write about how his identity and relationships in his family — and his family’s identity and relationships with what he calls “generational curses”— form him. “It’s important to talk about family, because, at the end of the day, our family is really what we have left. I mean, we have our friends, we have friends that we think of like family, but nothing’s gonna quite be the same as the people you were born into, people you were raised with,” Gailyard said. “I believe those connections might be the most powerful… When you understand the people around you and your family… you know how they influence you, and then you start to understand yourself a bit better… What parts of them are like you, and what parts would you rather stay away from?”

To wrestle with these questions, Gailyard structures his poetry in what he described as “a mix between sonnet and… free verse.” He compares the way he uses free verse to break from the patterned verse of sonnet form — a poem composed of fourteen, usually rhyming, lines of iambic pentameter — to the way he hopes to break from the patterns of ‘generational curses.’ Considering “culture and history and everything like that, those generational curses and fears” are “implemented a lot from childhood because… it’s a lot of what you’re taught, and for a while you don’t really get independent learning and education, especially in black households… you really know what you’re told,” Gailyard said. “Writing definitely does help with breaking those curses and fears.” Gailyard shared the following excerpt of “Growing Pains,” a poem written from both his and his mother’s perspectives to each other:

“So you’re almost 18 and I’m happy for you

I couldn’t be more proud

You’re a man. What’s the plan?

Finish school, go to college, start a fam

Not too soon cuz I don’t want no grand-babies till I’m good and ready

So you better stay up out them wombs

Better stay up in that room, study hard, don’t ever slack

I don’t pay for you to be lazy.

Now you complain I’m on your back?

So since you’re almost 18, you’re a man?

You the man? Nah you’re a boy,” and the standout lines,

“Breaking out of patterns

I prescribe some better rules,” as well as,

“I know I’m almost a man but don’t forget that I’m your son.”

“Dear Mama”

Another one of Gailyard’s poems, “Dear Mama,” leans heavily into the nuances of fighting and self-reflection. In the poem, there is a mention of “choosing sides,” which Gailyard admits is a reference to the divorce of his parents during his childhood. The pain of a child being cast into the middle of a battle between parents is evident, and Gailyard said he hates choosing sides even now, because “no matter which side I choose, it would always feel like a lose-lose [situation].” In the following excerpt of “Dear Mama,” Gailyard pours out his pain in an attempt to find the truth in an emotionally volatile situation:

“Dear Mama,

You wonder where I went wrong

When did I lose that smile?

When did I become so debatable?

Stomping off the kitchen tile

Slamming doors, punching walls

Attacking you with my words

Feeling validated in the insults

The euphoric feeling, superb

Arguments in the marriage

Choosing sides like court proceedings

Anxiety reaching new heights

Never finding a ceiling 

And I was always guilty

Of picking sides

Always a lose-lose

Choosing between parents

Now you wonder why I’ve got some screws loose.”

“I prescribe some better rules” 

Gailyard doesn’t just write to break his own family’s generational curses, but also to understand his own identity and independence, and share about his own family, culture and history. For example,  just as he says in “Growing Pains,” he writes to “prescribe some better rules” and inspire people to do the same. This poem “show[s] people they’re not alone in how they’re feeling, and that [there’s] a lot of stuff that we hide [from] ourselves that we think isn’t normal but really is,” Gailyard said. “At the end of the day, we really just want to be heard.”

Ayoola Olubukola Ogunyimika ‘26 MFA

Emerging writers like Kendal Gailyard are not without other writers to read, speak with and learn from, such as Ayoola Olubukola Ogunyimika. She is studying Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry in the Expanded Field, which she describes as “poetics with research and poetics being outside the page.” Which, in essence, means “movement, sound, music, singing, cooking, artwork,” or anything else that comes to her mind. 

“For me, the ‘Expanded Field’ is like pushing through a physical threshold of what poetry seems to be and just getting out of [my] comfort zone and creating something new,” Ogunyimika said.

The Expanded Field is nothing foreign to Ogunyimika. For her undergraduate capstone project, she created a 34-page anthology of poetry “that was filled with medical illustrations, historical context, interviews and much more … based on living with sickle cell.” Ogunyimika’s anthology speaks from the archive’s silence surrounding the “history and timeline of sickle cell” from eras that predate the 1910s — when sickle cell disease was discovered — all the way to modern day. To reflect that sickle cell existed long before that, Ogunyimika said she likes“to use [her] family history as a way to emphasize how new the… discovery is in the United States.” For example, “my grandfathers— they have birth years around 1910, and my paternal grandfather definitely did have sickle cell, even though he didn’t have a ‘diagnosis’ at that time in Nigeria.” 

Ogunyimika’s work, which has received awards from the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America, still “[dissects] the culture of silence from an African diaspora narrative based on health disparities affecting individuals living with sickle cell disease,” including her own “experience of being a mother, being a parent, [her] spirituality, ways to cope, medicine,” which, “you know, is my artwork,” Ogunyimika said. 

A Self-titled Griot

When describing the motifs of her work, Ogunyimika said,“I really emphasize narrations on my lineage, intergenerational inheritances, cultural identities [and] medical experiences.” Her writing revolves around what makes her Ayoola. Ogunyimika describes how west African roots guide her poetic voice: Ogunyimika said, “I am a self titled Griot…in west Africa that’s a general term that is used for a storyteller, a poet, a narrator, someone that is reciting a historical narration of the times,” Ogunyimika said. Her parents had endless stories of the elders in her family. Born in Nigeria, Ogunyimika had the opportunity to “[hear] stories of the people that are no longer here, but are part of the family history.” To Ogunyimika, being a Nigerian first daughter is the foundation from which her writing springs forth. She says, “It defines from the center [of me] from where I’m getting my stories.” 

“pain written as epitaph” 

Though her storytelling as a Nigerian first-born daughter and title of “Griot” is certainly familial, Ogunyimika still feels like it is something she chose. “It’s intentional for me. With living with sickle cell, I feel like the reason why I write the way I do is because I write a lot about taboo things, or things that make people uncomfortable to hear. I like to say that I turn traumatic things into things that are divinely beautiful.” 

Through living and, “surviving” as Ogunyimika puts it in one of her poems, with the challenges of sickle cell inspires her to write for others living with the same. It is crucial to Ogunyimika, as well as others within the “sickle cell community,” that the aesthetics of her work do not distract from its confrontation of pain. Rather, she wants to use the aesthetic “to speak more truthfully about [her] own life story,” and her experience “in the sickle cell community… giving, providing service and collaborating with different organizations, being a creative researcher, presenting at different conferences, being on pharmaceutical advisory boards, art shows, commissions”— all of which she has been doing for 15 years. “I think it just feels very archival and, in a way, ancestral, of going back and bringing forth things that I know people that came before me thought of or worried about,” such as how “sickle cell impacted the Atlantic slave trade,” shared Ogunyimika.

Ogunyimika often works in the ekphrastic style, which she defines as “a literary device, an artistic device that can be used to create poems and different artworks after original or any type of piece, like looking at a painting and making a poem, hearing a song and creating an art piece… seeing a poem and creating a dance…” This ‘art from art’ exchange of  ekphrasis  has allowed Ogunyimika to “move” her and her family’s, community’s and culture’s lived experiences “through catharsis … [or] the intentional need and action of purging great emotions to get a release, to get comfort… I always work through catharsis,” Ogunyimika said, “because I live with chronic pain.” Her profession as a health coach has taught her “how [catharsis] works somatically in the body as well, to relieve a lot of stress and tension that we don’t know we have,” and how that, too, is an ekphrastic experience.

Ogunyimika shared the following ekphrastic work of hers, in which she wrote the poem “My People: Wet & Bloody” after her own painting, “Shackled in Sickles.”

“‘My People: Wet & Bloody’

This water is sacred

Still and waiting; it welcomes

this blood as sacred grace,

my bones carry the memories of a passage through space as

vessel

pain written as epitaph.

I’ve often thought of, since I was young(er), the Sickle Cell Warriors who were in the Atlantic

slave trade.

To think those souls survived, and their descendants are trying to do the same 

And because Sickle Cell is genetic, I can’t help but think of my great great ancestors who

suffered with pain everyday not knowing their bodies weren’t demons.

To think those souls dreamt of me, and I am somehow surviving”

Ogunyimika explained how the color red is represented within the sickle cell community. “That’s actually the color for our ribbon, but red for the red blood cell [too]” Ogunyimika said  “The brightness of the blue, the blonde, the brown skin looking [like] decay and then the contrast of the red” represent “the pain that is internalized with sickle cell.” To describe the imagery itself, ““there’s sickle everywhere,” Ogunyimika added, “if you noticed the curvature” even on the “hair on the body.”

Stories Into Histories

Ogunyimika is keenly aware of how her work fits into the broader world. She does not write in a vacuum, but instead acts as a historian for others to learn from and reflect upon. She says “I think it’s so important for people to have the power to express their own voice and take autonomy of their own story, because no one else is going to tell your experience but you. And it’s very important that in history, your pain doesn’t get turned into something that you enjoyed or lied about later.”

Ogunyimika’s work highlights the need for one to insert themselves into history, and find where their story fits into the histories of their countries, communities and families. “It’s very important for you to have a voice and a face to the things you’re experiencing, the things that came before you, the things you’re hopeful for the future in your culture, cultural identities, to show people that it’s possible… as a Nigerian living in America as a first daughter, living with chronic illnesses.” When it comes to future plans,Ogunyimika says, “I look forward to really being able to publish more of my work, and some things are physically shared with everyone, hopefully these next few years, for some actual manuscript for everyone to buy.” 

Ogunyimika’s work can be found at the following link: https://linktr.ee/Arby_ayot