There Was Once a Sea

Water can be tricky for Black poets. In “The Shroud of Color,” Countee Cullen renders the ocean as a transcendent source of renewal and unmoored travel. In Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” however, the hold of a slave ship carries human chattel over a tempestuous sea on a “voyage through death, / voyage whose chartings are unlove.” Somewhere between these two poles, the scholar M. Jacqui Alexander depicts the ocean as teeming with lives, histories, and knowledge yet to be uncovered. “Water overflows with memory. Emotional Memory. Bodily Memory. Sacred Memory,” she writes. Those who have been lost to the water “do not like to be forgotten.”

In Phillip B. Williams’s new collection Mutiny (Penguin, 2021), water is one motif among many that needs to be reappraised and recast for the purpose of asking: amid global catastrophe, for who and for what is Black poetry? This has been a perennial question, asked and answered and asked again since at least the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773. But for Williams, poetry cannot continue lurching forward in the way it has. The old symbols are tired. Histories have been rehearsed to the point of estrangement. The publishing industry churns out Black poems for white audiences that want to feel Black trauma but then absolve themselves of guilt as fast as one can say “Tyger Tyger.” Black poetry is at a familiar crossroads: either it must give (white) people what they want or finally answer the call in Amiri Baraka’s 1965 manifesto “Black Art” to construct “a black poem. And a / Black world.”

Williams refuses this dichotomy. He prefers instead to write as a Black individual, which, for many who are not Black, presents an impossible proposition in itself. To be Black is to be (of) community, an object tied to a long history of enslavement and oppression that continues to overdetermine Black life trajectories. In her essay “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Cathy Park Hong discusses such gatekeeping in the context of avant-garde poetry, a category that has historically excluded women and people of color because their marginalization is indissoluble and thus their very essence refuses the free range of play required to be experimental: “The avant-garde’s ‘delusion of whiteness’ is the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history.”

And yet Mutiny showcases the formal and material play that is possible when a poet takes his Blackness on his own terms. The book begins with “Final First Poem,” an opening that negates readerly expectations, especially those around the calcified symbolic associations of the sea. The poem’s speaker writes the line “There was once a sea,” only to realize that such a verse holds little interpretive power for the poet who has never encountered the sea or been able to locate the precise time of once. In this way, the volume denaturalizes the seemingly indelible connections that inform our readings of Black poetry. To never meet the sea is to never meet the “beloveds creeping from sun-bloodied water in a salt-/ stained stolen dress,” a reference to the embodiment of the dead victims of the transatlantic slave trade that is Beloved, the namesake of Toni Morrison’s 1987 magnum opus. As book publishers continue to venerate Black writing that provides readers with uncomplicated access to Black suffering, Mutiny springs into an age-old debate about the ethics of how Black poetry can and should be read, ultimately averring that Black poetry is not a monolith.

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By 1926, the literati of the Harlem Renaissance had a conundrum on their hands. As many Black writers experimented with constructing a unique racial aesthetic that was still distinctly American, white audiences devoured Black literature as an exotic treat and traveled uptown to witness Blackness in action. In response, George Schuyler, a Black writer then coming into prominence with his social criticism, published a derisive editorial in the Nation titled “The Negro-Art Hokum.” He argued that to speak of Black art as being distinct from white art capitulates to the idea that there is an innate difference between the two racial groups—a fallacy because, as he acerbically notes, “The Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon.” This polemic prompted Langston Hughes to write the now widely anthologized essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which rushes to the other side of the debate by urging Black creatives to not eschew the Black heritage that influences their social position and, thus, their art.

In Mutiny, Williams takes a bit from column Schuyler and a bit from column Hughes to restructure the relationship between Black poets and the field of poetry. In poems such as “Mastery,” he acknowledges Schuyler’s insistence that Black art has not always escaped white influence, even as the poem’s speaker tries to write himself out of such a quandary:

I slept in the Fifth House of Modernism,
beneath stars that offered no light—dust
full of fear, my own dead skin encrusting
room corners and my mind in a schism
between image and luck.

Williams also recognizes Hughes’s assertion that for Black writing to be in vogue, its practitioners have to navigate white audiences’ appetite for stereotype and caricature as they see fit. In “Final Poem as Request for Maskot for White-Ran Journal, or 'They sure do love them some Black pain,'” written in a faux Black Southern dialect, Williams lampoons corporate requests for particular kinds of Black sound that unearth particular kinds of Black selfhood:

What you got up in dat verse what you got up in dat verse
            [a couple uh guns / a couple uh blunts / a couple uh suicide
            doors / Dior chokers / all duh shit you adore?]

Williams examines similar concerns with being a Black poet in his debut, Thief in the Interior (2016). In “Inheritance: The Force of Aperture,” for instance, he asks us to consider what it means to aestheticize Black people when their bodies and lives have historically been considered objects to fear, fetishize, or dismantle:

Black bodies and their high aesthetic
value: teeth, toes, and severed penises in jars
strangely priced. A post card, violent mail,
shows the photo of three men lynched in Minnesota […]
[…] white writhing over black, the American aesthetic.

In Mutiny, Williams extends several preoccupations from his debut and directs them toward the thieves in the exterior in prosodic acts of what the scholar Christina Sharpe, in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), calls “wake work.” It’s a term with multifold meanings that may be best described in this context as creative endeavors that “do not seek to explain or resolve the question of [Black] exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity.” Elsewhere in her book, Sharpe asks how one mourns the interminable event that is continued Black devaluation and marginalization in the now. Mutiny obliquely pursues an answer through a series of withholdings and introspections that reveal the difficulty of the question.

Let’s return to “Final First Poem.” The speaker’s lack of unfettered access to a slave past addresses a problem with readerly assumptions—namely, that the Black poet should have such access in the first place. The poem gets underway with a line that shows how complexity has been erased from the Black poet even before he sits down to hone his craft: “In the beginning, I suspect my index is on fire.” By the last stanza, the speaker’s entire book is on fire and he entreats the audience to “[let] ash / fill the fugue that was your need. Now, open your hands. / Reader, read to me what you have stolen and called your life.” As the speaker’s multitudes smolder, the reader looking to find 19th-century Black history may still locate its traces in the cinders, especially those readers for whom Black is homologous to slave. However, to satisfy such a need with only Black poetry is to disregard that slavery obviously implicates white people as well. But white people use Black art as a Tide pen to remove their own stains of complicity.

“Final Poem as Tidalectic Elegy” uses the theory of tidalectics developed by the Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite to think through how avarice and brutality reemerge in various state practices. For Brathwaite, history is cyclical, a series of recursions and overlaps rather than progressive disjunctures. In Williams’s elegy, which also directly engages Sharpe’s writing, the transatlantic slave trade reverberates in our apprehension of contemporary migrant crises in the Mediterranean. The poem itself formally reflects a tidalectic model of time in three sections: 42 lines followed by an interlude followed by the previous lines repeated in reverse order with key differences. The combined effect of form and content emphasize the weight of the past on the present. The slave ships accumulate into current-day migrant ships and penitentiaries, repeated and deeply related forms of violence against the marginalized both on sea and on land.

Other poems, such as “The Flying African” and “Interlude: Sasa and Zamani,” introduce African diasporic conceptions of time and space to unsettle the West’s hegemonic views of those fundamentals of lived experience. The former poem takes up African folklore and history to articulate a sense of longing among the dispersed who were forcibly removed from the continent via processes of enslavement or colonization. The latter poem sets up a temporality within mourning, a process that is also characterized by repetition and sudden emergence. The time of living intersects with the time of memory without privileging acts of remembrance as the only reputable way to contemplate the dead: “Forever be my father in your becoming forever.” To become forever is to not appear in the recollections of the living; instead, it is to end up in the eternal repository of lives and experiences that holds such matters long after anyone can remember them, a dimension of time known as Zamani.

As easily as the past ruptures the present, the present has few effective tools to disrupt the past. In “Final Poem for the 'Black Body,'” Williams recreates the famous diagram of the slave ship Brookes, first illustrated in 1787, but he uses the word ditto to represent the hundreds of enslaved African bodies crammed into the ship’s hold. The poem, an interplay between prose and image, underscores how little of the past is knowable by representing what Sharpe has called the ditto-ditto archive, a reference to the ledger of the slave ship Zong, which described the human cargo onboard with the word ditto standing in for the names listed under the “Negro Man” and “Negro Woman” headers.

In a footnote inside the poem, the speaker fails to “love the [enslaved Africans] out of their caricature, back into a name, to love a name onto them, misbelieving the rendering represented anyone but these featureless tremolos beckoning in replication a need to be held.” What is the potential for humanizing the lives that were lost and will never be reclaimed? These human beings, which now inhabit the collective time of forever, cannot be retrieved as individuals who lived real and complicated lives. M. Jacqui Alexander tells us that the dead do not like to be forgotten but our archives of slavery—slave narratives and letters and ship manifests and tax documents and insurance claims—are incomplete at best and gross mischaracterizations of the truth at worst. To humanize Black people through the documents of the oppressor is to witness Blackness through the lens of the oppressor—that is, without distinction, a series of dittos.

Mutiny’s most persuasive tactic for getting Black poetry out of this socially imposed bind is to demur at the process of humanization altogether. Poems such as “Final Poem for the Biography of a Black Man as Animal and His Enforced Embrace of a Human Praxis” and “January 28, 1918” situate themselves within a long tradition of Black writing that refuses to resolve the baffling question of whether Black people are actually human. In her recent work, the theorist Zakiyyah Iman Jackson shows how Black writers and visual artists since at least Frederick Douglass have unsettled the boundaries between Blackness and animality in order to dislodge the Enlightenment logic that has historically drawn the parameters of humanness. Following within this tradition, Williams occasionally occupies the space between human and animal to better interrogate what it is that humanity has to offer.

In “Final Poem for the Biography of a Black Man as Animal…,” language fails to bestow the speaker with a humanity that he has not sought. The speaker, an asthmatic turned into a centaur by a racist society, writes and writes, but language cannot accurately capture who he is, no matter his eloquence. The Bible, itself a concatenation of verse, has flattened his work into unsatisfying declarations of personhood:

There was a poet in him cadavered
by liturgy: I am, I am, I am his ruptured
correspondence, his bewitched ontology
 
he could no more stamp out than stomp
clear its fire-fucked flag of himself.

This venture of writing oneself into humanity ultimately fails because it requires those who determine personhood with calipers to find Black writing persuasive. And then who wants to be of such a species? By the end of the poem, the speaker reassesses from the vantage of a self-knowledge cultivated outside the confines of a master–slave dialectic:

The centaur is dead and so is its maker.
The man removes his clothes and feels.
He does not want to be paw or possible.
 
He wants to be alone, private, not your agreement.
He wants impossible. Unlearnèd without reign.

To not be your agreement is to self-determine, and the poem leaves the door at least somewhat ajar on whether being human is what he wants when becoming human is so exhausting.

The myth of the centaur, however, is no match for the myth of America, a fictitious narrative of progress and triumph built off the backs of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the otherwise marginalized. This myth swells in national moments of conquest and extirpation. Williams takes an overlooked moment of such destruction and asks what poetry’s ethical responsibilities are in approaching it. “January 28, 1918” invokes the Porvenir Massacre, a brutal occasion in which white soldiers, ranchers, and Texas Rangers broke into the homes of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, murdering 15 men and boys. The poem, which starts with a rendering of these events, pauses to list the names of the dead and ask “What is the border between tragedy and beauty?” In order to answer this question, what had been a more traditional poem explodes beyond form to include etymological stemmas, meta-commentary, lists, poems within poems, fiction, nonfiction, and other unorthodox points of entry into the details of this gruesome happening.

The history of this massacre evinces the atrocity that goes into creating national boundaries. Porvenir, a border town in western Texas that was eventually abandoned, presents a limiting case for what being human actually secures for those who need to become human. The answer may very well be: not much. Williams offers the definition of frontier as a way to make sense of what goes into the establishment of borders, both those that carve out national space and those that categorize species. He concludes that perhaps breaching the frontier of humanness requires further interrogation:

That some believe there is a crossable border between
     human and savage that should not be crossed.
That some believe that they are the sole “human” who could
     never become something less.
That some believe “human” is our ontological apex.
That the “savage” finds its shape in the mind of
     the “human.”

Conferring humanity onto human beings comes with contingencies. The humans giveth and the humans taketh away. This dialectic between the human and the non-human has extracted so much that the poem finally must ask what the point is. If humanity and citizenship and life are subject to such capriciousness, what does it mean to occupy such a position?  

Perhaps it is grief that makes a human life most livable. Williams’s poems about his grandmother—“Shame” and “Final Poem for Grandma Elizabeth’s Cancer,” among others—foreground the complex entanglements of divergent kinds of love and intimacy. In “Shame,” the filial love for a maternal grandmother dying of cancer is briefly displaced when the speaker remembers how the grandmother’s life lessons segue into lustful ones. “Final Poem for Grandma Elizabeth’s Cancer” marries the forms of the persona poem and the acrostic poem to juxtapose an earnestly erotic appeal to death (“I’ve been so lonely, Death; / nurturing shadows with my breasts”) with the almost comical expression spelled out by the first letters of each line: “cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer bye.” In poems like these, the range of human emotion is on full display, making being human worthwhile even if only for fleeting moments.

Langston Hughes ends his 1926 essay with a call for Black writers to write through complexity in order to portray themselves without a care for reception:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

It’s possible that poetry does not and cannot answer every question we have in this uncertain moment, but as we continue to reckon with the possibility of Armageddon, Williams’s ability to make us think and feel may have to be enough.