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Tiana Clark’s ‘I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood’ (2018)

(Disclosure: So there are some graphic images in this review, which I’ve included to contextualise some of the references Tiana’s getting at in this collection. Some of you may find it perturbing, but that’s inevitable when you’re talking about the subjugation and oppression of black people, and everybody needs to acknowledge it. Sadly I don’t know Tiana Clark and I don’t know any of the folks at University of Pittsburgh Press. I do know however, that I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood was recently awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for 2020. That’s why I’m reviewing this text now, and not 2 years ago. I adore this book’s squareness, its unusual dimensions, and the amazing cover art by Terrance Hayes I Think Imma’ Nina Simone, it really draws your attention in close.)

I’m completely overwhelmed by this collection’s ekphrasis, its call and response, its limitless multiplicity. The precision of its syntax, the continuity between each poem, the scrupulous referencing, of myth and reality, of plays and music. All of these facets to the work converge into an unnerving revelation: history is a construct, it is not a study of the past. Rather, history is what evidences now, and it is felt all the time. I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood is a read which demands an education, it demands learning and reading. The array of influences Tiana takes to construct these pieces are incredibly specific, and I think for many people who haven’t familiarised themselves with black history, they won’t be able to fully grasp these important contexts from which these painful emotions and images emerge. I certainly wasn’t able to understand everything Tiana refers to, I’m certainly no scholar on this, and that’s what made the collection so rewarding and so important for me, because I learned things! I was encouraged to go out and read a new reference each time I came across one.

And it’s not just other influences which have helped Tiana to conceive this collection, it’s of course, experiences, the fundamental currency to which we document and understand life better, the impetus behind all writing, all art, in my opinion. She is negotiating so many difficult, complex discourses in her collection, y’know, she’s reaching into the collective trauma of black pain and how that corresponds to events in history which still ripple in her as though they were happening now. She’s unpacking the relationship inside of herself, her blackness, her whiteness, what it means to be mixed race and the displacement of being mixed race. She’s opening up her marriage with her white husband, the relationships she forges within his family, her own family. She’s stressing an inaccessibility on her end, to her world, to her emotions, through skin and blood.

When you’re writing about systematic oppression and racial abuse, you have to research and ruminate. It is a hard thing to do, especially if you’re carrying intergenerational trauma as a consequence of race, or colonialism (usually both, the two go hand in hand it seems). You have to go deep into your sinews, invade all your ancestry, dig up the coffins and hold the bones. You then have to read endless reams of literature which sustains centuries of bloodshed up to the present day, the present second. It’s not really something I can articulate in language, what it does to a person to lay out their history, and review it, when the history is so present and so acutely terrible. it becomes inextricably bound to your essence, to your self-perception. The trauma is in your blood. Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood is inarticulate with devastation and beauty. And at its roots, there is a great kindness in this work, a profound message of honesty and vulnerabilty within all the blood.

There’s three parts to the collection, ‘i. I Can’t Talk’ is the first chapter, followed by ‘ii. About The Trees’, and then ‘iii. Without The Blood’. The last part is an epilogue which I’ll refrain from unpacking because it’s the end, but it’s one of my favourites. Before any of these chapters start there’s an opening poem called ‘Nashville’ which I assume to be Tiana’s hometown.

‘Nashville’ initially feels quite an objective piece, because of the way it chews on streetnames, buildings and musical figures pertaining to the area, but then it begins to waver and move to a more subjective focalisation. It gives you a clear indication of what this collection is going to do with voice, (and yes, to unpack black pain but) it’s going to merge the individual experience with the collective experience of racial trauma, and it’s going to do that seamlessly and beautifully. First, it’s tackling all these binaries, the white handprints on black identity: ‘hot chicken on sopping white bread with green pickle / chips—sour to balance prismatic, flamed-colored spice / for white people. Or, rather, white people now curate hot / chicken for $16 and two farm-to-table sides’. How to make appropriation sound gorgeous haha, I mean you’d think it wasn’t possible, but I just love that line, ‘sour to balance prismatic flame-colored spice’. You can visualise so much there in just six words, it’s lip-smacking. And then denial: ‘they’ve hungered fried heat and grease from black food / and milk—but didn’t want to drive to Jefferson Street or don’t know about the history of Jefferson Street or ell’s Half Acre, north of downtown.’ Within the first two stanzas of ‘Nashville’, I’m confronted by a disparate environment, its two sides, its two divisions, black and white.

Later we move into Tiana’s periphery: ‘[...] my mother’s mother’s mother—Freelove was her name, / a slave from Warrior, North Carolina, with twelve children / with names like Pansy, Viola Oscar, Stella, and Toy— / my grandmother.’ Think of the meticulous research that goes into recalling your family tree, the conversations you have with family, growing up, absorbing those names into you. That’s self-identity emerging, here, when you envisage the family tree fanning out its branches. Then we move back into, what we think is more general, but is in fact entirely personal, if not more so, recountenances from history:

‘[...] Southern Babel, smoking the hive of epithets hung fat above bustling crowds like black-and-white photographs, mute faces, red finger pointing up at my dead, some smiling,

some with hats and ties—all business, as one needlelike lady is looking at the camera, as if looking through the camera, at me, in the way I am looking at my lover now—halcyon and constant.

I immediately recognise the reference. It’s a gesture towards the infamous photograph below, ‘The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith’ (1930). Notice how Tiana says, ‘my dead’. Not ‘the dead’. It’s much more tanigble and excruciating than that, because it’s a disposition she shares, a fate which is only separated from her by just 90 years.

What’s most horrific about that passage is that last line: ‘in the way I am looking at my lover now—halcyon and constant’. It is so chilling to find symmetry in looking at your lover with the same depth of calm and bliss, that the subjects in this photo exhibit in the scene of a lynching. It’s so cutting—white people look on hung, dead black men in trees with the same tranquility you find as you look to your lover. It made me feel quite sick, to read this conflation of two entirely different impulses generate joy.

These distinctions exert themselves throughout the collection. ‘Soil Horizon’ for me, gnaws on these gaps of experience and privilege. But perhaps more painfully, they distinguish the core differences between them, for this you need to bear in mind that the husband here is a white man:

My husband’s mother wanted to take the family portrait at Carnton Plantation. I was the only person she called to ask if it was okay. She said We could redeem the land with our picture— my brown skin acrostic to the row of their white. She said Can’t we just let the past be the past? [...]

[...] tipping back and forth the purpled stains of Confederate blood. I said it was fine as long as we weren’t by the slave cabins, and she laughed and I laughed, which is to say I wasn’t joking at all. [...] How do we stand on the dead and smile? I carry so many black souls in my skin, sometimes I swear it vibrates, like a tuning form when struck.

I literally don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s just ravaged with ignorance and conflict. It begs questions. So this poem reminds me of that time Ani DiFranco decided to plan an artist retreat at Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana, and then the entire Internet called her out and she lost fans because of her sheer ignorance. So she cancelled the retreat, but addressed it as a mistake, which wasn’t okay, because it wasn’t a mistake, she knew, and she didn’t even express remorse. And it’s one thing for a singer like Ani DiFranco (who y’know, I thought was a bit more aware than that), but fuck me, when it’s your own mother-in-law? Plantations, to everyone else’s perception, are these gorgeous places framed by white porches and rocking chairs where flowers billow on the verandas, surrounded by deciduous trees and lush flora. But what they represent is terrible, and you can’t be there without feeling the disquiet of whips cleaving flesh from the backs of slaves working the fields. Who wants a picture with that? Who’s brave enough to dismiss that? This poem filled me with more questions about, like, where does the complicity come from, inside of someone, to want to party with that, like it’s nothing? Like family, to ask you to willingly stand in a place where you would’ve been enslaved? It left me enragingly inquisitorial, and completely blindsided when I read, ‘Can’t we just let the past be the past’?

Well, for reasons which the past can’t just be in the past, Tiana outlines in ‘The Ayes Have It’. For anyone that doesn’t know, ‘The Ayes Have It’ means ‘the yes votes win’. When you think about it in terms of the 13th Amendment being passed, it’s a rather aprocryphal line, assumed to have been declared by Abraham Lincoln. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime, and passed 119 votes to 56, so 7 votes above that two-third majority Congress needs in order to pass a bill. And in Tiana’s collection, ‘The Ayes Have It’ unpacks how empty that statement really is, when you correlate it with all the “history” that comes after the Emancipation Proclamation.

When I think of Trayvon Martin, I think of Emmett Till, when I think of Emmett Till, I think of young, black men in the South, then I think of young, white men in the South, I think of my husband, who is white, born and raised in Franklin, TN. I think of how he tries to hold my hand, sometimes I pull away and not because I don’t love him, but because I’m alert, I think of other people, other people, who are born in the South, [...] So when I think about a post-racial America, I don’t— because the trees in the South have strange fruit histories, the roots are deep red, tangled and gnarled, so again— when I think of Trayvon, I think of hoodies, then I think of stereotypes, I think of skittles and high fructose corn syrup, tasting the rainbow, and then I think of gay marriage, then just marriage in general and then I’m back to my husvband, and see he’s trying to hold my hand again, but the truth is I’m scared,

For me this poem really hammers down the intricacies of time and it’s incapacity to alleviate pain. Time is not always a healer, and it’s not always symptomatic or impetus for change. Like I get the sense in ‘The Ayes Have It’ that time is an ellision of past, present and future, which reinforces the fallacy of history, y’know that history is “how we access the past”. This poem is saying that history is more alive now than it was back then, because of the way history forges our present-day experience. That’s to say, the 13th Amendment was passed, but that doesn’t eliminate any of the murder that has happened. Rather, it magnifies the murder that still happens as a consequence of that bill’s passing, that no law out there can undo what is indelibly embedded into the cultural psyche of a country. America as we know it, is a stolen land, and that land has been compromised further by slave trade, disproportionate wealth, unjust laws, the rust of the “American Dream”... To rehash all of this is hard to stomach (and I feel equal if not even more shame about the UK here), but really what Tiana’s saying is that, nothing’s really changed. People still lust after the “old South”, people still fly Confederate/Dixie flags especially down in the Southern belt. All of this makes a mockery of that phrase, ‘The Ayes Have It’. The reoccurring overtness of murder motivated by racism, the inequality black people still face not just in America but across the entire globe, demonstrates that equality is a superfluous concept for some people (namely of privilege). That instills a fear so thick that it leaves the land time-locked. And I’m reminded of a quote from Nina Simone: “‘I’ll tell you what freedom is to me. No Fear.”

And in ‘The Ayes Have It’, you see that fear removes one from being able to comfortably hold the hand of your husband in public. That’s still a thing. And it’s not a sentiment that is readily taken seriously because that sort of situation is not a universal one. So about we try and reverse experiences here?

I’m thinking of ‘BBHMM’ in Tiana Clark’s collection, which was written “after watching the music video”. Like a lot of these poems, this is another response piece, and here Tiana’s responding to this music video and song by Rihanna. And the ekphrasis here fills your mouth up with someone else’s blood. Hopefully, everybody here knows who Rihanna is, and if you don’t know the song ‘BBHMM (Bitch Betta Have My Money)’ then you can watch and listen here. Here Tiana ruminates on the debts, both monetary and spiritual, she has sustained throughout life, and the wistful desire that distinguishes her from Rihanna, body from body, and the power Rihanna wields, in a violent revenge she takes on a white accountant and his trophy wife. By the end of this music video, Rihanna lies in a vintage Goyard trunk covered in the accountant’s dried blood and fresh dollar bills.

The music video was inspired by an incident in Rihanna’s life where her accountant cheated her out of her own money. What follows in the video’s narrative is initially the kidnapping of a married white woman married to this wealthy white accountant, and Rihanna’s just dragging her body all over the US, lynching her upside down, drugging her, bashing glass bottles over her head, tying her up naked in the back of the car, degrading her, calling up this accountant like, “I’ve got your fucking wife here, pay me what you owe me”, all the while she’s smoking huge blunts and wearing these gorgeous Maison Margiela PVC and clear perspex heels, from their Fall 2015 collection. And in this video, the roles are reversed. This is a black Jamaican woman exerting her power, dominating the space, making demands and subverting all these preconceived ideas of power dynamics. Like it’s not just about being a woman commanding her authority to get her money, it’s about being a black woman doing that. So when Tiana says in ‘BBHMM’:

I hate it when people

talk about black artists being capitalists. Why can’t we thrive in something rich and green too? And let us be loud about it? Let us be loud without consequence.

This is declaring how equality should manifest, in that culpability for managing your own capitalist agency, wielding your financial power to your advantage, is a freedom which ought to be extended to black people too, unapologetically so, without condition. When you look at figures like Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé Knowles, Kanye West, y’know the people have networths of millions, (I think Yoncé is a billionaire, actually), they get called out on it, cos they’re black and “oh they should be committed to the cause of total equality”, “why aren’t they socialist”, “how dare they portray violence towards ...” etc. How can wealthy black people experience and enjoy their welath without consequence, in the same way people like Ellen Degeneres do, or Brad Pitt, or Taylor Swift? It’s these sorts of repetitive inequities which demonstrate just how present systemic racism is in society. The poet’s voice is then condensed down to a much more personal place:

But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay with the fruit from their body. Yeah, I’m spreading my legs for someone else, because I’m hungry and always at the end of some kind of altar. Even now, I’m paying for my doctor to reach and scrape inside me to say I don’t have cancer. [...] Somewhere someone is counting the cash behind a velvet curtain. Once, a boy said, suck it, bitch with his heavy, dense hand at the back of my head pushing. Pushing is another way to mean pay me what you owe me. I didn’t forget. Yeah, I see the total at the bottom of the receipt. I have so much debt. I am forever in the wettest red.

So here’s that distinction I’m talking about between Tiana and Rihanna here, where Tiana cleaves from the bloodshed of the I’s experience and endows it as “debt”, the asymmetrical symmetry between accountants creaming off the top and frauding black artists to a black artist sifting blood from the inaccountability of her histories. There is a kind of fraud which is being cleaned out, a body for Tiana to reclaim which is owed. Tiana doesn’t shun this video, like Rihanna, she indulges in this fantasy where roles are reversed, she yearns after the blood-stained legs, she exclaims her own violences. I also really love how these poems are spaced too, like they cause you to savour and linger on each word, even if the word fills you with repulsion, or fear. It really slows down the writing, the reading, it helps for the absorption of these powerful poems. ‘BBHMM’ is a critique where the ‘I’ absolves to inhabit its own body unapologetically, to indulge in oneself without condition or stipulation, to desire yourself out of the squalor one is displaced by. It’s a poem which ruminates on how to survive when all you’re thinking about is how the hell you’re going to survive, whether it’s a lack of money, or your mouth being crushed down on someone.

I’m also really enamoured by the role religion plays in these poems, it’s just an endless sort of preach where God infects and heals, cracks and mends. Tiana endlessly explores those tensions in almost all of her poetry, being brought up as Christian but not holding oneself to a belief. From ‘Ways To Be Saved’ (one my favourites):

1. [...] She asks—as if she herself is maple syrup being poured—Do you love Jesus? in a way that you will remember precisely for the rest of your life. You answer Yes because you’ll give this sweet lady whatever she wants, but the question hovers, hummingbird flapping: the question, the name—Jesus, all of it

[...] 2. You are still a child when you walk down the altwar and ask God to enter your little heart. You do not know what this means yet. An older man touches the top of your head. His white hand feels like a brick. You repeat after him. [...] You ask to be washed. You ask to be whiter than snow. [...] 4. You are in the backseat of a moving car. You are twelve. You want a kiss you the mouth, but he pushes your head down and makes you suck. You are thankful for the potholes on Hold Hickory Boulevard that make the grill of your braces scrape the shaft of his penis. You get the taste for blood too early. [...] 9. [...] You practice at pain. You do this every day. Pretend. You make it look like you are hurt. 10. [ ]

For some people, God redeems the inarticulate, terrible pain endured in a lifetime. What happens when it’s believed that the same God justifies slavery, and therefore your pain, in holy scriptures? How does one bleed differently? And the fact that God invariably still accesses situations which no one can save you from, including God, like rape, like being rendered anonymous. Like suffering is the ultimate test of your faith to God. Shit like this echoes of the same devices used to control and subjugate. And ultimately, these systems of religion are enablers to the pain which the ‘I’ here carries all the way through, it trickles down generation to generation, with the same uneasiness and abject grief. What I think Tiana is engaging with is a distrust of any kind of system that emerges from control. And systems resolve to control things, particularly religions, particularly when they’re instilled within you since youth. As you get older, you become more detached from these narrowed perceptions, you stop believing it’s possible to be saved from inequities of life, more pertinently the debasing racial abuse. When you learn that the Bible has been leveraged in such a way to condone slavery, you find that religion is a punctured vessel, something to be wary of. Such ideologies have the potentiality to pave the way for systemic racism (and they do, all the time) which reoccurs and eats on itself like a snake, (as in Cotton Mouth, pg. 4). Racism is very much present and with us, it’s not at all discarded, and this comes back to what I mean when I say history here, is a fallacy. It doesn’t exist when you’re still living it.

This is such an incredibly layered collection, and it commands a plethora of political and religious discourses pertaining to black pain. Just the way Tiana hops between Apollo to Rihanna, enriches this concertina compression of history and art as all happening on the same plane. That’s already a powerful technique to wield, but the way she articulates language she uses to navigate these undulations is deeply beautiful, like the collection beams with gorgeous imagery. Like, (and I’m just snatching lines I loved from different poems here): ‘You are six and approached by a lady named Mabel. You think her name is maple syrup, as your skin and her skin as the color of pure sap’ from ‘Ways To Be Saved’; ‘Praise the witness and his blistered onyx back, cracked coal, black tephra.’from ‘Ode to the Only Living Object that Survived’; ‘His hair thick and lacquered and damp as a bowl of pitted black olives, / the sheen of which could make you weep if you lingered there.’ from ‘In the Middle of Things...’; ‘limp pendulum, waxy-bleach-white blooms, / egg whites inside hardboiled eyes / sway and rock, roll forward, fragrant. / I’m ready to find the ruined churches.’ from ‘The Rime of Nina Simone’. Tiana’s writing is gritty, viscous and fleshy. It invades all the senses, like there’s something sort of metaphysical about it which makes the collection a piercing read. You can smell the hot irons, you can feel the metallic clink of blood across your teeth. And it’s in the viscerality of this language where Tiana writes the exquisite beauty of the world and the pain which sucks on its surface and down, deep into the marrow. All of that is attributed by the collection’s powerful title, I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood. It’s also a collection which really highlights her penchant for research and mashing that knowledge into the rough meat of these personal stories which invoke so many raw feelings. Pain and beauty are inextricably bound sources of power, a binary cut from the same cord, hanging from the same rope. It’s complex, it’s rooted, and this collection deserves all the acclaim it receives.

So, if this book reaches out to you, you can purchase I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood here. Try to buy direct from University of Pittsburgh Press if you can! As for Tiana Clark, she can be found here, here and here.

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