Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era

Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, Emily Rutter, Darlene Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000737165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation.

PART I
Elegiac Reconfigurations

Tony Medina

Senryu for Trayvon Martin

Skittles bag
Pockmarked holey
Bleeds in rain puddle

Hoodie hides
No blood, tears, or
Eyes shut by wet grass

Screams pierce night sky
A father’s stomach pits
My boy! My boy!

Shot through sky
Skittles like Roman candle bursts
Blood from open chest

Stars squint and stare
Raindrops glare in moonlight
Witnessing bloodletting

Mourning grass
Like wet face of boy
Screaming bloody murder

Gunpowder blinds / The eye of justice reckless / As a dumb vigilante

Silence of blood clouds
Night drizzle where wind
Whistles through hole in can

Empty bag of Skittles
Crushed can of iced tea
Last game with father

Rain chews night air
Gnaws at brown boy flesh
Grinning teeth of bullets

Rain stains brown boy’s
Back as blood pours from chest
Turning the green grass red

How blues is born
Rain falls steady on dead end
Street strewn with black body

Mama’s cries hang
On rain hooks ornamenting
Night wind’s grin

Blood petals pock
Grim face of grass like lotus
On rain slick back of black boy

Not enough lifetimes
To take back powder burn cries
To piece my boy back

Tony Medina

From the Crushed Voice Box of Freddie Gray

I am the Magic Negro
The Black Houdini
Who done it
Done it to him self

I handcuffed my own
Damn self
I threw myself
In the back of the patrol car

My hands shackled
Behind my back
Slaveship cargo
Ago

I am the Magic Negro
The Black Houdini
Who done it
Dooze it to him
Self him black self

See, Ma? No hands!

I snatched the pistol
From the white man’s
Mind
From the back of the
Patrol car—

Suck on dis, Houdini!
I grabs the gun
And shoot my
Self in the chest
Neo-colonial style

The autopsy report says
Damn—
Would’ve been easier
To walk on water
I bet you a quarter
He done shot himself

I am the Magic Negro—
Spineless—

I brokes my own spine
After hogtying myself
Into a pretzel even
Houdini who done it
Would envy

Only to turn myself
Into a human pinball
Rattling around
The steel gullet
Of a Negro pickup truck

Once reserved for newly-
Arrived Potato Famine
New York Irish drunks
Down on their luck—

Me—moi—
It is I who was
Othello—
Oh hell no—

Yes—me
The Magic Negro
The Black Houdini
Who done it—
Dooze it all the time

To him self
His own
Damned self

Angela Jackson-Brown

I Must Not Breathe

If I am stopped by the cops I must be quiet. I must not breathe.
I must not ask questions. I must not breathe.
I must not move.
I must not breathe. I must not talk back.
I must be compliant. I must not breathe.
I must not film the cop.
I must not call family or friends. I must not breathe.
I must not put my hands up or down. I must not breathe.
I must cooperate. I must be docile.
I must stay in the car or get out, depending on the mood of the cop.

I must not breathe too loudly or too quietly.
I must only do what I am told even if what I am told to do goes against my
basic civil rights.
I must not breathe.
I must hope that the cop is having a good day.
I must hope that the cop is a “good cop.” I must hold my breath and not
breathe. I must not be suicidal.
I must not be angry. I must be civil.
I must be obedient.
I must grin and show all of my teeth.
I must shuffle and dance, but only on cue.
I must not get stopped but if I run,
I must be prepared to die.
I must be prepared to die.

Anne Lovering Rounds

American Diptych

Jerry Wemple

Nickel Rides

For Freddie Gray

I.

Back in the days when your grandfather’s father,
maybe his father, was a young man down at the shore
amusement piers or the scruffy city lots over near

the wrong side of town, they used to call them nickel rides.
Steel boxes jacking up and down, bucking around,
make your back feel like it was worked over with crowbar,

your hips like they was smacked with a plank.
Back in my day, word was out about those nickel rides
on the Philly streets. I was in from the country, hard

down by the river and the woods, but even
I knew what was what. Saw clear enough that one day
while stretching my legs near the 30th Street station

waiting in between long-run trains, when the paddy wagon
pulled up and four cops jumped out, jumped a man I hardly
noticed, whacking him good with long sticks. I figured soon

enough that I needed to take a left, cross the street,
head up another, act like never saw nothing, especially
a side-vision glance of him being cuffed and dumped

in the back of the wagon for a nickel ride. That unit
screech-lurching down the street like the driver wanted
to bust the brakes and run out all the gas all at once.

II.

First off, the war on drugs is a concept. There ain’t a war on drugs;
there’s a war on people. All wars have casualties, atrocities.
All wars have losers. Only some wars have winners. Tonight

I see Charm City up in flames. Orange tongues of fire taunt
us from brick buildings. The old people say it’s just as it was
back in the King riot, nearly fifty years ago. They say
the neighborhood ain’t changed much since those days.
We had one good store. Now it’s burnt. Kids too young to remember
Tupac let alone Reverend King dodge in and out of focus,

like they were spun off their own nickel rides, dazed from the experience.
Philly, Baltimore, D.C.—I’m not much for cities. But a twist of fate,
a change of luck, and I could’ve been. Missed being born in Baltimore,

city of my conception, by a few weeks or a month. I got a parcel of kin
buried in the German saint’s cemetery in the Manayunk section of Philly.
Generation or two before them it isn’t hard to fathom other blood kin,

all those years removed, being sold in an auction lot in swampy D.C.
Of course, there’s a war on despair, too, though not official
and having no spokesperson. It’s often erratic, explosive even,

but is long-going like the rest. Likewise, despair too is a concept,
and so needs a people enemy. And sometimes it’s them, but in the end it’s us.
Me, I avoid the nickel rides. I watch on my TV what’s happening

one hundred fifty miles downriver in slacked-jawed sorrow.

1
DENORMATIVIZING ELEGY

Historical and Transnational Journeying in the Black Lives Matter Poetics of Patricia Smith, Aja Monet, and Shane McCrae

Laura Vrana

The genre of elegy is intrinsically fraught with irresolvable contradictions: between the desire for consolation, and the need to deny that any compensation for the one lost is possible; between individuating the elegized through personalized details, and acknowledging death’s universality; and between those recurring tropes that have long shaped elegy, and the innovation required to grapple with any loss that feels singular. Such contradictions abide in elegies focused solely on commemorating private losses, without consciously considering societal ramifications. But, because of slavery’s unnatural violence, black elegists have historically experienced these pressures in distinctive ways, since elegy could arguably only be effective in serving abolitionist goals by depicting individual losses as representative of the institution.

Responding to contemporary iterations of this problem, black Americans murdered in publicized instances of state violence must often be elegized in ways that innovate within and around expectations of the genre. Embracing contradictions¹ drives this formally and ideologically innovative work of reinventing elegy now in vogue among African American poets grappling with the psychological and social tensions produced by such deaths. For instance, the traditional elegiac desire to portray the deceased as singular can feel incompatible with advocating institutional reform, which demands demonstrating how a loss participates in systemic injustice. Further, contemporary black poets tend not to distance or objectify the dead² but rather to identify with those lost, since what Christina Sharpe—in the indispensable study mentioned in the introduction—terms “wake work” mandates confronting the possibility of the speaker becoming the next one slain.

This chapter argues that elegiac poems in Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art (2017), Aja Monet’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter (2017), and Shane McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor (2017) respond to these contradictions by expanding the genre across the boundaries often constructed in American elegy between nations and temporal periods. Their poems reveal that these national and temporal boundaries tend to silence institutional critique, serving to buttress claims that it is always “too soon” to shift attention from individual deaths toward reform. In refusing those boundaries, Smith, Monet, and McCrae draw attention to the transnational continuities and historical duration of struggles against racism, shifting notions of readers’ ethical obligations. These poets demonstrate that “black mourning troubles the temporal logic”—and implicit national logic—“of Freud’s framing of melancholia and mourning,”³ revealing how Western linear time and national borders support ideologies reliant on devaluing black lives. Thus, poetically troubling the transparency of those systems of representation helps to weaken these hierarchies and disrupt the constant “weather”⁴ of anti-black violence they prop up.

These three writers’ poetics are quite distinctive: Smith’s work heavily utilizes inherited forms, rhyme, and metrical patterns; Monet’s draws on spoken word styles descended from Black Arts Movement aesthetics, incorporating fast-paced wordplay and informal devices like eschewing capitalization; and McCrae’s deploys excess white space and unexpected lineation and mid-word enjambment, visually evoking innovations currently affiliated predominantly with academic poetry. These stylistic differences reinforce the texts’ thematically unique focal points. Smith links past murders like that of Emmett Till to the present, while raising in new ways traditionally elegiac questions about distance from or intimacy with those more recently lost. Monet’s tone channels the confrontational approach of Black Lives Matter activism in connecting Middle Eastern and American struggles. Finally, McCrae produces imaginative, meditative thought experiments colliding the distant past and the twenty-first century. But ultimately, all three differentiate their turns to history from those encouraged by the widespread view that “the slave past provides a ready prism for apprehending the black political present.”⁵ They illustrate instead that probing the unruly temporal and spatial parameters of black mourning produces fresh ethical relations to the past in an age of disappointment over black leaders’ failure to “connect the sins of the past to the crimes of the present”⁶ and in ways that might meaningfully alter current discourse around time, nation, and the loss of black lives.

Beyond standard elegiac efforts to represent the ambiguity around temporality often induced by the rupture of loss,⁷ elegy by black poets demonstrates that normative views of temporality and their impact on relationships with the dead help maintain the repressive institutions killing those mourned. Hence, crafting elegies that exceed the timeframe of the deceased’s lived experiences works to counteract that repression through rejecting Western linear temporality. For instance, by weaving intimate details about long-lost ancestors into elegies for those recently lost, Smith, Monet, and McCrae undermine fixed ideas about chronology and claims that time progresses teleologically, accompanied by inexorable progress. Writing elegy that strains against Western boundaries of time also engenders more ethically complex relations to the past. As R. Clifton Spargo highlights, under normal societal views, “[t]o mourn ethically ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: "Where Will All That Beauty Go?": A Tribute to Poet-Scholar Tiffany Austin
• Introduction to Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era
• PART I Elegiac Reconfigurations
• PART II Hauntings and Reckonings
• PART III Elegists as Activists
• Prompts for Further Discussion
• Appendix for Further Reading
• Contributors
• Index