About me

creative commess is the musing space of Soyini Ayanna. I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago with a Guyanese mother and a Trini father. Pop culture in general interests me, but particularly West Indian and African diaspora popular cultures.

I write short fiction, poetry, and critical essays; I like to consider aspects of pop culture from a black West Indian feminist lens, which means I get really excited about interconnections between diasporas and diasporas in conversation with one another, and there’s lots of nonsense cloaked in anti-blackness and misogynoir that I have zero tolerance for.

I am slightly obsessed with tropes of West Indian identity and or nationalism. Also slightly obsessed with black cultural spaces (both literal and figurative) like juke joints, steel pan yards, shebeens, gayelles, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power, tamboo-bamboo among others.

I am a black feminist* and womanist and I prioritize black women & girls & black femmes always because we’re often undervalued and overlooked. I often find myself revisiting areas pertaining to race, blackness, anti-blackness, culture and identity to name just a few. I believe in the supremacy of pum-pum shorts and that wining is good for the soul (trust meh, it is). I frequently think about and critique popular West Indian & Trinbagonian cultural trends, soca trends and what I see taking place.

I also love majestic old trees, communing with said trees and nature, quality teas and rum, bodies of water, cheek-kissing and Julie mangoes (list is not exhaustive).

This blog is simply an attempt to keep myself writing about and exploring those things –freely and as randomly as I want — so, whenever I catch a vaps to do so, essentially.

Additionally, #AllBlackLivesMatter — whether in Morvant or Laventille or Curepe or Kingston or Georgetown or anywhere throughout the diaspora. #BlackTransLivesMatter and #BlackQueerLives Matter today and every blasted day. ✊🏿✊🏿✊🏿 

Since some people were wondering about it: the header pic is from an art project that my very talented friend directed and asked me to pose for. About the title of my blog, according to the 2nd edition of Cote ci, Cote La: Trinidad and Tobago Dictionary (which I love & highly recommend), “commesse” means: “confusion associated with arguments.” and “wheeling and dealing.” And sometimes, “gossip and slander” (48). (You know, context matters.)  I spell it the alternate way, but like “baddis” and “baddes,” “mampie” and “mampy” — when it comes to local and regional colloquialisms — we all take liberties. Or spell it how we feel like. Or whatever.

Please attribute and cite anything you may use from my blog.

Feel free to link the I with collaborative ideas, offers of tea, feedback, or numbers from what yuh dream last night at: soy.ayanna [at] gmail [dot] com

If you ever feel inclined to support my writing and helping me finish a manuscript one day, or you want to help increase my tea stash, or you just have dollars to burn as they say, send me some coin 💲 here! 💲

Find some of my poetry, fiction and nonfiction work inside: Anomaly, Small Axe 53, Apogee Journal, Cleaver, Moko, Black Renaissance Noire, tongues of the ocean, sx Literary Salon, St. Somewhere Journal, The Guidebook, Black Girl Dangerous, 2010 Caribbean Writer and in Racialicious’ Love, Anonymously series.

I was awarded a scholarship to the 2019 Key West Literary Seminar Writers’ Workshop in poetry. My writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, named a notable essay of 2015 in Best American Essays, and was the 2016 winner of the Small Axe Literary Competition in poetry. I have been awarded a 2023 PERIPLUS Fellowship. Woot-woot.

My poetry chapbook Taste of Hibiscus (2013) is available from Dancing Girl Press. (Granted some of those poems make me cringe now, but still.)

*trans-inclusive feminism always