Protected: An interview with Dr Nat Raha

In this interview for You Are Here, Jet Moon talks to Dr Nat Raha about their journey into Survivor Writing and why it matters.

You Are Here – peer to peer survivor writing – is Jet’s second survivor writer’s platform; building on the first: Playing With Fire which took place in 2021. You Are Here offers an expanded series of workshops, a survivor writer’s group, via Spread The Word, and a series of interviews for the Wellcome Collection archives. 

Listen along as you read

“ …one thing I want to say, upfront, because I feel like it’s… 

advice to other survivor writers almost on this question of the 

toll, of trying to speak what has previously not been said in this 

way is… big. 

And I don’t want to say it’s like ‘toll,’ as in just the cost. But 

I don’t think this is necessarily just about writing creatively 

as well. I have this with academic writing and other critical 

writing too. 

To work on things that are challenging, difficult, personal, that 

your body has been through. I want to say that either as your 

body as we exist now, in this moment, or maybe your body as 

you understand it ancestrally… 

…I think to work through that is also… 

that’s where the power comes from. 

And there was some elements when I was performing this, 

especially the second performance [in Galway], where I just 

kind of felt this flow of like…there’s something about the 

embodied…my embodied presence in the performance and 

trying to literally just have a flow that’s a bit more playful,… 

…it’s like an embodied language. 

It’s like a…an expressiveness that does feel kind of like 

animated and playful and a bit lighter, coming from the.. as 

like a way of trying to release the weight of the heaviness of 

thinking about these historical traumas. 

Yeah, so that’s… that’s maybe the performance and liveness 

thinking about it there. And that’s part of how to respond to that, 

I think trying to respond to these weights.”  

“I regularly get asked around my use of 

a ‘we’ in my poetry, that I primarily write with the first-person 

plural, more than a first person singular. AndI often say that it’s an 

invitation to join that ‘we,’ if you see yourself within it. 

But obviously, I always have a sense of that so… am I thinking 

about, like, brown and black feminist diaspora? Or am I thinking 

about queer and trans community, worlding, life? Or some 

combination there of all of this. So maybe there’s a promise of 

collectivity that, and again, this is creative, right? 

I don’t write representative work, per se. It’s… the writing is trying 

to make something exist or trying to show something that has 

existed. So maybe there is always this imagined space for the 

reader or the listener to be in the text in that way as well.” 

Listen and read the full interview here

About the artist

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, histories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. 

Jet Moon is a multi-disciplinary artist who writes, performs and collaborates on fierce work for radical social change. Collaborating for many years with the LGBTIQ, kink, sex worker, disability and survivor communities they belong to, dedicated to creating intimate spaces of sharing, visibility and resistance.