Reflections on Black Poetry

Editor's note: My residency program decided to do the American Bar Association's 21-day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge. We've split up the days to read, listen, and write a reflection to share. Here is the second of my two contributions; you can find the first one here.

Today’s readings were a smorgasbord of poetry and songs from some of the most famous Black writers over the last 100 years. Some of them ask us to sit with the discomfort of violence willingly, repeatedly, and sometimes gleefully perpetrated against Black bodies. In “Between the World and Me” (1935), Richard Wright (1908-1960) writes about coming upon the aftermath of a lynching in a forest clearing. He imagines that the dead man becomes him, and that he is tortured and killed all over again.* It is a reading that would have paired well with Billie Holiday’s (1915-1959) “Strange Fruit” (1959, not on the syllabus' that's her above).

In the Year of Our Lord 2020, it is disheartening to listen to Nina Simone’s (1933-2003) “Mississippi Goddamn” (1965)--illustrated below--in which she recounts some of the acts of hate in that state. I know the current state legislature just voted to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag (and replace it with the words “In God we trust”…), but how can we have come so little distance in the intervening 55 years?

More contemporaneously, Claudine Rankine (1963- ) reads the selection from her book Citizen (2014), “You are in the dark, in the car…” that is linked to on the syllabus. She recounts microaggressions, culminating in the time when her new, “trauma-informed” therapist (a white woman), mistook her for not-a-client and tried to drive her away from her home office, although she had arrived on time for her first appointment. The long history of Black witness to white racism makes me think about what I have suffered other people to go through as long as I was comfortable. I can’t say, “I didn’t know. How was I supposed to know?” Black people have been telling us for centuries.

Experiences of repeated racism like these cause festering wounds, as Langston Hughes (1902-1967) wrote in “Harlem” (1951). Do you remember “What happens to a dream deferred? … does it explode?” I saw this famous last line referenced in an article about the riots that happened after George Floyd’s murder. Speaking of famous last lines, the syllabus includes both The Beatles’ “Revolution #1” (1968)—in which John Lennon (1940-1980) mumbles against a static-y background about everybody wanting change, nobody having a plan, and his refusal of violence as a solution—and Nina Simone’s answer, “Revolution (Parts 1 & 2)” (1969), which concludes:

Singin’ about a revolution [lookin’ at you, John]
Because we’re talkin’ about a change [so much talk, so little action]
It’s more than just evolution [i.e. it won’t just happen, you have to make to happen]
Well you know, you got to clean your brain [this is what we’re doing now as budding anti-racists]
The only way that we can stand in fact [Black and proud]
Is when you get your foot off our back […oh]

White people and institutions must lift their feet off Black people’s back (and their knees off their necks). I think this line speaks to the fact that it’s never been that there’s something fundamentally, inherently defective about Black people (or other people of color); it’s that white people are holding them back from achieving their fullest individual and collective selves. Sometimes there’s active racism, other times it’s allowing racist laws and discriminatory actions to continue. In the face of all this sorrow and anger, June Jordan’s (1932-2002) verse, “1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer” (2005), celebrates a Southern Black woman who was undaunted by living with racism.

Even when white people think we are helping, sometimes we just aren’t. Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992) meditates on the deficiencies of white feminism in “Who Said It Was Simple” (1973). White women who hire Black women as “the help,” as if being a servant were good-enough employment, made Lorde wonder whether her racial identity could survive a “liberation” based only on her sex and not also on her race. It reminds me of that circle of intersectionality with all the lines representing different facets of identity. By the way, if you are interested in illness narratives, you should read The Cancer Journals (1980), Lorde’s account of her breast cancer treatment.

I’ll conclude with Alice Walker’s (1944- ) tough love poem, “The world Rising” (2015). She encourages the reader to wake up and do the hard work already. Good people working together have changed the world for the better (she gives the example of the environmental movement). We must work on ourselves before we can work on the world. But, it’s “A compassionate roll:/ We must be done/ With cruelty/ Especially to ourselves,/ To start again/ Beaming like the sun;/ Fresh.” Be compassionate with yourself as you roll over and get out of bed. Start the new day fresh, with a promise to #BeBetter than you were yesterday.


*While I recognize that the author is not necessarily the first-person protagonist in a piece of writing, it is hard to think that Wright didn’t identify with the “I” in this poem.