Joshua Bennett is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University. Winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, his poems have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Callaloo, the Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Penguin Books will publish his first collection of poems, The Sobbing School, in September 2016.
To Live Day By Day: On apostrophe & 21st century Black elegy
Let us guard against saying that death is opposed to life. The living being is only a species of what is dead, and a very rare species.
The quiet terror brings on silent night.
They are driving us crazy. And our father’s
religion warps his life./To live day by day
Is not to live at all.
I have been thinking about the ways that those who live at the edge of life[1] speak of the dead. How they speak to the dead. How elegy functions in the everyday lives of people said to be more or less dead already, those for whom social life and social death are inextricable entities, ligamented by the long, ruthless arc of modernity. Put somewhat differently, I am interested in how black-identified persons living in a cultural moment marked not only by the sheer ubiquity of black death—for we can take this as something of a historical constant—but also the presence of various forms of televisual technology (including but not limited to various social media platforms which make it so that images of anti-black violence can circulate with unprecedented frequency) write about death and dying. In what ways are they asserting a philosophy of life, a philosophy of living while everything around them crumbles?
The figure of apostrophe—i.e., a speaker’s direct address of a dead person or else some legibly nonhuman entity—is as good a place to start as any. Danez Smith uses a version of this device to great effect in the recently published excerpt of his long poem, “summer, somewhere,” wherein he provides a vision of the afterlife designed especially for black boys slain by State violence in its various forms:
this is how we are born: come morning/after we cypher/feast/hoop, we dig/a new boy from the ground, take/him out his treebox, shake worms/from his braids. sometimes they’ll sing/a trapgod hymn (what a first breath!)/sometimes it’s they eyes who lead/scanning for bonefleshed men in blue. we say congrats, you’re a boy again!/we give him a durag, a bowl, a second chance./we send him off to wander for a day/or ever, let him pick his new name. that boy was Trayvon, now called RainKing./that man Sean named himself I do, I do./O, the imagination of a new reborn boy/but most of us settle on alive.
Here, the moment of what I’m reading as a certain kind of apostrophe—congrats, you’re a boy again—is made somewhat unfamiliar not only by the fact of the voice of a speaker that is inherently multiple, hence the repetition of we throughout the poem, but that is also, given what we know about the conceptual universe of the work, themselves deceased. And what does apostrophe look like, what critical labor does it perform, when it does not come from the mouth of a living, breathing speaker, imbuing the nonliving object with agency or vitality, but from a site where there is said to be no life in the first place? In grand fashion, Smith’s poem grounds us in the present by lifting us all the way up and through the clouds, setting us down on other worlds ruled by cosmologies unfathomable, worlds where a boy once killed can be resurrected by his brothers beyond blood, each bound together not only by the laser-like precision of a white supremacist social order, but the black sociality that exceeds such power. We get a briefest glimpse of the speaker gesturing toward Trayvon Martin and Sean Bell, as if to praise the beauty and grandeur of the new names they have given themselves, RainKing and I do, I do names that double as reclamations of what was taken from them on the nights they were killed. Smith knows that the work of imagining the end of the world requires an altogether different metaphysics from the set we have inherited; an elsewhere beyond what we might think of as, to riff on Audre Lorde, the mouth of the dragon called Western civilization. And he gives us just that. Herein, the dead speak back to us. They show us the way. They call us by our names.
______________________________
[1] This is a phrasing that I am borrowing from Colin Dayan.
