Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

‘Brexit shows democracy doesn’t work’: An interview with Titania McGrath

Titania McGrath, 24, is a radical intersectionalist vegan activist, feminist slam poet and the author of Woke: a Guide to Social Justice. She won’t meet me in person for security reasons – she fears doxxing – or send me a photograph of her face. Rather, she consents to an interview by email from her gîte in the Buis-les-Baronnies district of France, where she is “working on a new anthology of slam poetry which will end the patriarchy” in the nude. This is from her poem Cultural Appropriation:

Plunderbeast of history. My ancestors scream in your hollow wigwam, Ghostrolling in the ectoplasm of your hate. I staunch the flow of simpering tribal sauce, A digital sombrero clings deafblind To a face falsely smeared in a coalish hue.

She wrote Woke because, “I was permanently banned from Twitter for a whole day. This gave me time to reflect on my subjugation as a woman in a patriarchal world and write a book about my oppression. The entire document is a masterpiece unparalleled in the history of the written word”.

I am not sure a book dedicated to the destruction of the Capitalist patriarchy should be available on Amazon but there is no contradiction for Titania: “I’m attempting to destroy the capitalist system from within, and the only way I can do that is to make a shit-load of cash”.

She is confident of good reviews, but she will not allow men to review Woke: “Any male who attempts to review my book will be committing a form of sexual assault”. (I hope the literary editor is reading this). She thinks men are the cause of all misery, and should wear blinkers, like horses: “They’re gruff. They’re bad-tempered. They have base sexual instincts. And they sleep standing up”.

Yet she does not identify as a woman: “For me, gender is not so much a spectrum but a kaleidoscopic ouroboros, in a state of perpetual self-nourishment.

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