Chaun Webster’s Literary Mixtape of Nat Turner

Literary-craftsman Chaun Webster creates a technicolor and highly contextual art-piece in his latest work, Because When We Say Nat It Be Writ Large (BWWSNIBWL). In the original style of concrete poetry and in the vein of a biomythography, this work dances with myth and reality, improvisational in it’s retelling of a narrative central to individual and collective liberation, on the cusp of this year’s Juneteenth. You can purchase a copy on his website, Free Poet’s Press. – Adjoa Inspired to delve deeper into the missing parts of slave-revolt leader Nat Turner, Chaun identified that the original Confessions of Nat Turner had a significant amount of it’s content attached to personal impressions. “We’re talking about someone’s perception and their memory and capture of particular events, of how things have played out,” he notes of the original author. “For me, I was really interested in how we are only getting a fragmented sense of who Nat Turner was in the Confessions. That is where I found room for myself as an artist to play in.” Utilizing the literary art of biomythography, Chaun could find ample space to incorporate a contemporary, first-hand component to this book. “That’s why this work is a biomythography,” he explains. “This is not just Nat’s story, [...]