Language can preserve memory, but it can also enforce systems of power. Jada Renée Allen’s poetry inhabits that tension. Her work draws on the language of family speech and ancestral oral tradition alongside the vocabulary of institutions — legal documents, psychiatric diagnoses, and military terminology — used to define and govern human life.

Allen grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a family one generation removed from Mississippi. “I like to say I was born up South,” she says. She traces her earliest sense of language to the way people spoke and interacted in the Black communities where she grew up. “The culture, the way we engage each other — I consider it the first type of poetry.”

Allen is a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she is developing two poetry manuscripts that explore different dimensions of language, history, and collective memory.

The first, DRILL, examines institutions that shape contemporary life — policing, incarceration, and military doctrine among them — while tracing what Allen calls the “afterlife of slavery,” a phrase coined by scholar Saidiya Hartman to describe how slavery’s structures continue to shape the present. Allen says the project reflects how that history remains embedded in many of the institutions that organize life in the U.S. today. “We’re not so removed from history or each other,” she says. “A lot of what we experience now is still informed by those structures.”

In many of the poems, Allen borrows the language of institutions themselves, juxtaposing the blunt vocabulary of legal and bureaucratic documents with lines of rhythmic, incantatory verse.

The title poem in the manuscript, “DRILL,” adopts the structure of a legal resolution, repeating the word “Whereas” as each clause gathers fragments of history, family memory, and protest. The poem includes several voices at once — from a U.S. Army training manual to Chicago drill rap (the hard-edged style of hip-hop that emerged on the city’s South Side), and personal recollection — allowing institutional language and her experience to tangle on the page.

In the poem, a question recurs: what does Allen’s nephew want to be when he grows up? The answers shift until the response finally narrows to a single word: “alive.”

Allen traces her relationship with poetry to spoken-word traditions and hip-hop. As a teenager she watched performances on Def Poetry Jam and the youth poetry competition Brave New Voices, where poets like Patricia Smith and Sunni Patterson first caught her ear. “That drumbeat is in my blood,” Allen says. “That type of listening.”

Allen sometimes describes herself as a “conjurewoman of letters,” a phrase that reflects how she understands poetry as a practice of calling memory, ancestry, and historical presence into language. Within African-American spiritual traditions such as Hoodoo and root work, practitioners sometimes describe a “two-headed” way of seeing — one consciousness grounded in the visible world and another attuned to the spiritual one.

Allen has similarly referred to herself as a “two-headed Black girl,” a phrase that reflects the way her poems move between documented history and ancestral presence. “I’m interested in reading the world, not just reading the page,” she says.

Allen did not initially imagine her work taking this shape. Early in her writing life, she says, she felt pressure to pursue a more conventional literary path. “I was trying to be a staunch formalist,” she says. “Trying to practice forms that would be taken more seriously.”

During the pandemic, Allen entered a period of personal transformation that reshaped both her life and her writing. She is transfemme and says the experience prompted her to reconsider how gender identity, spirituality, and ancestry were connected in her life. “My physical transition was also a spiritual one,” she says.

Raised as a Christian, Allen began examining how that religious framework intersected with older African and Indigenous spiritual traditions preserved in Black communities. Enslaved people often concealed those practices in Christian forms, allowing them to survive under conditions of surveillance and violence.

While DRILL confronts institutional power, the second manuscript Allen is developing, MOYO, turns toward spiritual autoethnography, a form that interweaves personal experience with wider cultural and political narratives. The title comes from a Kikongo word connected to the origin of the word “mojo.” In that project, Allen studies how Black communities have historically reshaped or “queered” English in order to preserve cultural knowledge and memory across generations. “I’m looking at language as a type of ancestral technology,” she says.

Allen has used her FAWC fellowship to revisit memories that had previously been difficult to approach. She describes the process as “mining memory,” allowing childhood experiences and family stories to surface with greater complexity. One poem she began writing in Provincetown, “The Crown for Clarence,” honors a late relative who was one of the first openly queer Black men she encountered growing up. “He was unapologetic,” she says. “His sweetness and energy.”

Allen cites writers such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Evie Shockley whose work attends closely to history, memory, and the lives of Black women. “Black women are often the custodians of that tradition,” she says. “The ones who narrativize and vocalize our dead.”

“I’ve felt like I’ve been writing this manuscript since I could begin to write,” Allen says. Some lines in DRILL, she says, date back to notebooks from high school. At the time, she sensed they belonged to something larger, even if she didn’t yet know what form that work would take.

“I tucked them away,” she says. “I knew they deserved something more than what I could offer them then.”