There are so many things that haunt me, from the trivial lacks: the lack in recreational time, the lack in listening to my music collection, the lack in pleasure gained from reading a good book (or even a god-awful one)… to other “lacks”, just-as-trivial-but-deeply-personal-so-seems-gigantic: the lack (as an African American) of sovereignty, the lack of Black mythology, the lack of Black methodologies, the lack of an ethnic signifier other than “African American”… my desires are more autonomous than that. I could be Igbo… or Zulu… within the confines of this African America, but we lack that. Does hiphop have a signifier? Or Black Punk? I am a member of the Affrilachian Poets, so perhaps my tribe is Afamlandian. AfroAmlandian? Naaah…. But this desire runs deep. My identity is rooted in the real & imagined realms of the Black Diaspora that I call Abstrack Africana. Such designs go way back, into childhood, when I thought I would grow up to be a sociologist or a historian or even a theologian. Whichever career it would be in service to the ideas of Black liberation I’d grown up hearing about in art, music, and literature. But my knees were too bad to be Commando No. 1 leaping as if Batman from rooftops down into alleys in protection of Black identities attacked by the agents of imperialism. Bad knees… and mounting debt in adulthood. How could I ever be The Revolutionary if I feared being crippled by a horrible credit score? And yet my haunts remained. Remain. There remain voids in the background of the African American brand of the diaspora, simply because filling those voids in meant bodily injury or physical death at the hands of those forbidding such endeavors. Name a single Black swashbuckling hero or authority figure you pretended to be as a child prior to the rise of Michael Jordan. No wizards, no warriors or knights of old performing heroic deeds, slaying the dragon. Perhaps we played Native Americans when playing Cowboys & Indians and that was as close as we got to playing someone of color (and if modeled after Hollywood, then we even got that wrong!)
Do not fear, dear reader, I am not here to woke you. At least, not directly.
So if Black Rambo wasn’t in my future then I’d become a black poet. The Black Poet. Ironic, as for so long I refused to call myself one since poetry was my older sister, Karen’s, thing and I suffered terribly from sibling rivalry. It’s only been 15 or so years since I bucked up and admitted my calling to the world, made all the more easy since by this time Karen had been consumed with being a fabric artist; tho, for what it’s worth, Karen was an excellent poet in her day and had she not introduced me to the Black Arts Movement writers, then I’d likely be drawing up lesson plans on some godforsaken boondocks campus. So, rest in peace, sis; have the Scrabble board ready… and thank you.
I’ve been writing, then, since 1985. Ten poems a day, everyday, throughout the 90s. So over 30 years I estimate that I’ve written 10,000 poems. Not 10,000 “good” poems; just 10, with the possibility of being good, 1,000 times each. Every version is a new grapple at identities publicly not allowed for 300 years and then systemically disavowed as “Black people don’t do that” for another 100 years. And we all believed that. All of us. My poems have been that attempt to heal those sections of history. But how does the Black Poet hellbent on canonical (if not, cannonical) revolution decapitate Shakespeare and still walk away with a genius grant? (Not that I’ve ever had one; please feel free to nominate me!) I don’t hate ol’ Bill, but we’ve been gate kept in how we bard for so long and have never had the chance to lionize cheesy, cliched Black creatives except to mock, mimic, or make minstrelsy of ourselves and others, gaining approval from The Hallowed Halls. No one quotes a cliché from a single mediocre Black poet from the 1800s… what rivalries have we missed out on? Ghanian & Nigerian poets in 1825 dueling at sunrise with cinema retelling such events glamorously on screen. We were not allowed to muse ourselves because the White world needed honey? (Metaphor for rubber, cotton, tobacco, rice, diamonds, lithium, whatever whatever whatever.)
And I was charming back in my early days of metaphor-barren forays into prosody. I was edgy… or “edgy”… throwing Molotovs and stealing nuclear codes in free verse. But after several years, the Angry-Black-Poet became formulaic and I grew tired of preaching to the choir of other like-minded liberation-inspired poets. “Hey, it’s 2006, let me join this here online poetry workshop… I could learn a thing.” But the Black Love poem I submitted for critique was said to not have enough “poverty” in it. “If a Black poem, where’s the anger, the outrage?” Someone said, “this poem isn’t Black enough; I question the identity of the poet who submitted this.” Each one a white critic. I countered, “this is a love poem” but withdrew it and left the site (that poem, “Bring Pigs to the Wedding”, is in my latest collection, The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife). “Black Poet” had become a trope by the early years of the 21st century, but more than that, had it also become a trap? The Black Revolutionary died in me on that day. On that day I became the Black Reverse-Engineerist. My writing stopped exploring history and potential outcomes and turned to root causes. Branding. Marketing. I abandoned poetry as philanthropic work and suddenly saw it as propaganda able to control a narrative and racial ideologies. Who controls what we romanticize? And failing to become that, is becoming a fetish the best outsiders to the system could ever hope to become? Fuck that. Yeah, Olympus must fall indeed.
And it has to fall, especially for the Africans trapped in these parts of the diaspora where their progeny have been condemned for not accepting Zeus (thematically) as lord & savior. Zeus, Circe, Shakespeare… all must die. My first collection published in 2020 has a poem originally titled, “Let’s Kill Merwin” (don’t frown, I absolutely love Merwin) but the outrages of a Black poet can no longer be so obvious. Especially as an unlettered autodidactic with no supporting cast mates from well-established MFA programs. So “Let’s Kill Merwin” became “Bus Fare For A Valkyrie.” To have the poetic references I wanted to see in the world I would have to weaponize “clean & articulate.”
Wait.
Have I been saying this all out loud this entire time? Dammit.
No, no… channeling Our Supreme Leader, you’ve apparently misread everything I’ve written. I’ve written four full collections of poetry and know all of the best allegories. So admire me or I’ll invalidate your liberties and your birth certificates. I beg you to praise me as I was raised to also praise your haunts and loves (even when the participation of Black Folk came with an asterisk):
“& if you wish to know —
i open mouth & wallow you
you swollen fish hallow in my navel
i scale the gleam in your eyes
my medulla gasping for reflective rapture…”
Seriously, who doesn’t want to feel the pleasures of acceptance? But if all I offer you in lyric is the reflection of your own origin-story (real or imagined) supremed down upon me then on which grounds might I ever earn your respect? It’s a delicate dance, you, always hosting the dinner party at your house fearing I’ll deep-fry your avocado toast if you came to mine. And, no, we don’t deep-fry our avocado toasts… but what if we did?
I’m not asking anyone to alter their assumptions. I’m demanding you abandon them because adherence to them does damage to all sides of the equation.
“as your refusal
to laud me with decisive vow canonically vexes..”
Of course, to do that we both must draw upon mythologies foreign to us and not the stereotypes most often associated with citizenships, global or domestic. Perhaps there is union, if not utopia, in genetically modified folktales where Shakespeare is mused by Ludacris, therefore “when I move, you move”:
“therefore when I clepe there is no wherefore”
…just like that.
But until there is revolution to how, what, and whose languages come to be valorized, then the changes desired of our current civilization might never happen.
So help me get the body in the trunk.
