Work samples
About Saida
STUNT: a mythical reimaging of Nellie Jackson, madam of Natchez
What does it mean to know the interior lives of Black women? STUNT imagines scenes from the life of Nellie Jackson. Born in 1902, Miss Nellie ran a brothel in Natchez, Mississippi for sixty years until her death in 1990. A freedom fighter and entrepreneur who spied on the KKK and supported civil rights activists, Nellie Jackson is a legend that troubles our notions of Black narratives and histories. By turns jubilant, sensual and violent, STUNT imagines Nellie as a woman who revels in her Blackness, power and creation.
“Agostini’s understanding of the complex algebra that was southern Mississippi social mores plus the spoken and unspoken laws of commerce minus the opportunity cost of picking cotton vs peeling off linen ‘n lace times power in all its manifestations leave the reader like Nellie Jackson left her customers—satiated, but already hungry for more!”
—Frank X Walker, author of Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers
just let the dead in, Waller Gallery
Artist Statement
My maternal grandmother was born in the middle of the Pomeroon River, ushered into life by her grandmother, a midwife, soothsayer and farmer. Granny has told me stories of how Great Great Granny continued to usher her into life even after the work of birthing was done. The times Great Great Granny would come to her home, sack of provisions in hand for a hungry family of thirteen, all in a three room house by the river, ruled by an angry man.
It would seem we keep saving each other.
My paternal grandmother taught me to read, sew, read my plays, and convinced me beyond a doubt that I, a chubby little black girl with fat braids, was a genius. At the time, I thought she meant I was a genius at writing and art, but now I have come to recognize that this is a genius that has been refined and passed down as an act of resistance through generations of enslavement, violence and servitude.
We have a genius for loving. We have a genius for violence.
Before my great granny passed at 102, she shared a picture of her mother with us. Slight, pale, she was a tiny woman in a corseted dress, and bonnet, lips barely parted. Everytime we asked Great Granny to tell us about her, she would weep-and say nothing. The legend was that she was killed by her husband, my great-great-grandfather. I don’t know her name, and most likely never will. Just the inheritance of violence I know intimately.
Many of us in our family have been ruled by men: indifferent, loving, drunk, wise. Men who could cheat on their wives for years, humiliate them to their faces, and then rock a child to sleep with a lullaby that can still my heart in its tenderness.
I want to be able to tell you that these men are monsters, because it would make my life easier. I can’t. History is a round, funny thing. I can’t talk about my father as a prolific philanderer, without also talking about the man who wept in front of me because he was scared he wasn’t a good enough father. Or the man who held me in his arms every night as I fell asleep, protecting me from the monsters I was sure would come.
None of this is absolution. But I am writing to understand why my mother stays, why my grandmother stayed, and a whole world of black women who have suffered because they were in fear without these men, their children would not eat. I’ve spent years talking with my aunties, grannys and mother - all strong, proud women about this - and have met a whole surprising world of myths, fables and legends. Men cheat because they have the evil eye, and women go mad because they displeased a jumbee.
We don’t talk about the fact that Guyana has the highest rate of domestic violence in the Caribbean or its roots in a brutal system of enslavement, indentured servitude and indigenous genocide. How can we? What does it mean to try to hold discourse on a historical bondage that is strangling us even now.
I know this work is unforgivable. Unspeakable. I want to love us as we are, not what we have been trained to remember for survival. I think there is room for that. There must be.
I love every artery of Guyana: the Pomeroon River, the way it flows, how it is as pitch black as my great great granny farming among the graves in Kabakaburi. I love what the water holds, I love what we say it is: a universe of water babies, ole higues, moongazers and uprisings. We birthed this: a group of slaves, indentured servants and Arawaks, all meant to die. We made all of this meaning: lessons that taught young girls and boys to hold off on their pleasure so that their children can live. I want my pleasure now. I want to hold it with both hands and not be shamed of what my body can do unforced. I want to love myself as I am.
I think the dead can teach us that. just let the dead in is a call for Black and Brown folks to come together and connect with our dead in public spaces. It is a collective place meant to celebrate and honor the ways our ancestors not only survived but found freedom, however fleeting, and build a roadmap for lasting liberation. I think we need this, I think we desire it, I think it is our right.
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great great grannyArchival photograph of my great great grandmother from Guyana
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just let the dead inVideo from just let the dead in installation, featuring interviews with Michael Khan, also known as ole man pappie, and professor at University of Guyana, whose work focuses on Guyanese mythology and fables. Other interviewees include, Joan Cambridge, Guyanese writer and activist, and footage from my journey back to my grandmother's ancestral home, Kabakaburi, Guyana.
Black Ladies Brunch Collective
We released our first anthology, Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy in April 2016, by Mason Jar Press. The Baltimore City Paper hailed the anthology as the best poetry collection of the year. Our work has been featured at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Split This Rock and the Baltimore Book Festival. The BLBC has taken our words across the pond - and gone on tour in Ireland. In the midst of the pandemic, we continue to curate digital spaces for BIPOC poets to gather, celebrate and organize.
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Not Without Our LaughterCover of Anthology, Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy
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9/11/20: TJ Butler, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Saidi Agostini, and Brian PetkashBlack Ladies Brunch Collective Reading, featured at the Great Indoors reading
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Saida Agostini - "Adventures of the Third Limb"I read a poem from the Black Ladies Brunch Collective Anthology, Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy
Black Voices in Verse, Poetry Reading Presented by Takoma Arts
Love Poems to Black Survivors
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Bresha Meadows Speaks on Divinitya poem for Bresha Meadows, a young Black girl who killed her father in self defense, and was subsequently incarcerated at the age of 14, and nearly charged with murder.
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Saida Agostini - "An Ode to Rekia Boyd's Bloody Weave"Poem to Rekia Boyd, a young Black woman shot by the police in Chicago. Among the effects mailed to her family, was her bloody weave.
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Saida Agostini reads "A Kehinde Wiley Portrait of the Improbable"Black Poets Speak Out Reading, launched by Mahogany Browne and Amanda Johnston