True Story

Eve L. Ewing is a poet of limitless possibility. She seems to get sharper and more daring with each book, and her work reminds me and so many others to follow our “what if?” questions. As she tells me, “in order to create pathways toward that which we have never seen, we have to lead with imagination.”

Her newest book, 1919 (2019), finds inspiration in the Red Summer riots of that eponymous year, a paroxysm of racist violence that led to hundreds of deaths and civil unrest in cities across the country. In Ewing’s hometown of Chicago, 38 people were killed during a week of arson and looting, reportedly sparked by the murder of a Black youth who accidentally crossed the color line on a segregated beach. Ewing juxtaposes these events with epigraphs from “The Negro in Chicago,” a report produced by officials who later tried—and largely failed—to understand the riots. 

Ewing spoke to me by phone of this history and its deep impact on Chicago, where she works as a poet and a sociologist of education. Her previous books are Electric Arches (2017), a poetry collection, and a nonfiction work titled Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (2018). This interview was condensed and edited.

I love that so much of what you do is for home, which is Chicago for both of us. I’m thinking about your three books and the work you hope each does in the city. How is this book different?

I think Electric Arches is an autobiographical book—not entirely, but I think it’s informed in clear ways by autobiography. Ghosts in the Schoolyard is motivated by my wanting to better understand something I experienced and was impacted by [school closures on the South Side]. This book is a bit different in that it’s definitely a personal book, and I’m reading it sort of through my own preoccupations and my own experiences, but it’s more of an experiment, or an exercise, in trying to engage intentionally with this moment in history. As an artist, constraint or concept can be liberating.

I listened to Jamila Woods talk about her album last night and about how once she wrote two songs that were about specific Black people—I think the first was about Nikki Giovanni, and the second was about either James Baldwin or Eartha Kitt—she thought, “Well, I guess I can just keep going!” And it was sort of freeing for me to know that I wanted to engage with the source text here and talk about this historical moment.

Tell me about the source text and how you encountered it.

So the source text was this 1922 report called ‘The Negro in Chicago,” which was published by a group of men commissioned by the state of Illinois and organized by the Chicago Urban League and other organizations. Their task was to document the causes of the 1919 race riots and to think about how racial violence in Chicago could be prevented from happening again. It’s really fascinating for a number of reasons. I have a morbid sense of humor; the text is 800-some pages, and the governor at the time was like “if people just read this report, we’ll never have these problems in Chicago ever again.” And my joke was, I guess nobody read it, let me read this so I can end racist violence.

That lofty aspiration was fascinating to me, as was the aspiration implied by the title, this totalizing title, “The Negro in Chicago,” like we’re going to tell the entire history of Black people in Chicago in one document. Another thing that fascinated me was how much poetic language I saw in a document that was ostensibly not poetry. There were just turns of phrase and sentences and little narratives I thought were so elegant and beautiful and fascinating and strange, so I wanted to engage with it more.

That puts me in mind of Chase Berggrun’s R E D (2018) and Solmaz Sharif’s Look (2016), two other collections composed in conversation with another text. It’s cool how you use your source text as epigraphs—it’s so poetic. Is there anything that didn’t make it into the final draft of your book?

Well, there are a lot of things, and what’s kind of soothing to me is that the text “The Negro in Chicago” is available in the public domain. So people can read the entire document if they want to. One section summarizes the report of common stereotypes that people had in survey research, some of which are just really funny: “Black people like to wear red” or “Black people like to carry knives” or “The women like to get their hair done,” all these ridiculous things. It could have been a really fun litany or list poem of some kind. I thought it would have been fun to just make up a ton of them. There’s a poem I’ve been toying with for years called “Negro FAQ,” which is all the weird, dehumanizing questions people ask about Black people. These questions dehumanize Black people but also dehumanize the questioner because of their ridiculous illogic.

Absolutely. On that tip of how you use illogic and poems, I just need to say “True Stories About the Great Fire,” from 1919, is a fantastic poem. I end up screaming every time I read it.

Thank you! It’s my third “True Stories” poem. There’s one that made it into Electric Arches about Koko Taylor, and my first “True Stories” poem, about Carl Sandburg, has never been published. So, you know, I’m just into fantastic stories and tall tales.

How did this form come to you?

Originally, I liked the idea of making these true stories that are very obviously not true. I play a lot with the idea of truth and multiple truths and retellings. And I think some of that is because when I was in high school, I read The Things They Carried, and my teacher was like, “Yeah, some of these things maybe happened or maybe didn’t,” and I was like what?!

Yo, same!

I didn’t know that was something people could do. And I never want to be dishonest to a reader, so within the fantastic nature of what I’m describing, it’s clear that it didn’t really happen. At the beginning of Electric Arches, it says “all of these stories are true,” but some of the stories are about time travel and stuff like that. So, again, it’s kind of troubling the idea of what truth is. This poem is a little different because it’s not a real human person, it’s the Great Chicago Fire. I think the quote from “The Negro in Chicago” that the poem is responding to is that Black people are the worst thing to happen to Chicago since the fire. Lumping Black people together with the Great Fire in this pantheon of disasters lets us question the fire itself. I know Black people aren’t a disaster, so the person saying this is kind of an unreliable narrator.

I also want to talk about “There is no poem for this.” If part of the work of poetry is to give language to a moment for which there is no language, what’s the work of poetry when there’s no poem for what has happened?

For people who haven’t read the book, that piece isn’t a poem but rather a quotation describing someone being lynched during the riot in a part of Chicago that I frequently inhabit. There probably is a poem suitable to tell that story if I had worked another five years. Maybe if I were a different type of poet I would have just worked the five years that I needed to in order to write that poem. What I’m always trying to do is give readers an entry point into a conversation. I don’t proclaim to know everything or want to be a be all, end all. I hope that making a decision to include the source text there essentially serves as a moment of silence.

Sure.

You could give a speech, you could give a eulogy, you could critique, but sometimes just having a moment of silence is profound. I hope doing that and inviting people to encounter the text on their own terms can have just as much of an effect, if not more of an effect, than if I had written the poem. This is the space for the poem I didn’t write.

It’s effective because it happens right before “Barricade,” which has some of the wildest use of negative space. It creates this moment of deep quiet in the actual riot portion of the book’s three sections.

“Barricade” is a really tense poem because it’s about people shooting in the street, of this Black son being told by his father to stack garbage in the street to protect them from cars full of people who are going to drive down the street shooting at them indiscriminately.

I want to talk about “Countless Schemes,” a strong contender for my favorite poem in the book. I’m always thinking about reparations, both as an imaginative exercise and as a practice, so I wonder: what, do you think, is the role of imagination as we build reparations practices?

I mean, that’s the whole game, right? That’s everything! Because to create pathways toward that which we have never seen, we have to lead with imagination. People ask me the same question over and over: “How do you write in multiple genres?” and I’ve never felt that I have a good answer. It’s kinda like being asked “How do you like cereal and ice cream?”

That’s the best metaphor for it I’ve heard.

Yeah, shout-out to Milk Bar. I’ve been trying and flailing at answering that question since Electric Arches came out, but I think one thing I’ve come to is that my work is about critiquing and imagining. So, critiquing the world as it is and imagining the world as it could be. And those things have to constantly work in tandem. There’s a way in which it’s easy for people to say no to imperfectly rendered plans for the future. Like, “Oh, well, you know that idea for reparations would never work, that idea for prison abolition would never work.” But at some point, we have to understand that all the greatest social transformations in the history of our country and our world [came about because people fought] for things they had never seen.

True that.

It’s easy in hindsight to say “they did such a good job,” but they didn’t know they were going to win, right? People who marched in the street to vote or faced literacy tests and poll taxes, they didn’t know they would legally have a protected right to vote. People who fought for the abolition of slavery did so in a society that was entirely built upon slavery and so on and so forth. So imaginative work, as far as I’m concerned, is always a necessary prerequisite for anything else that comes after. And some of it is also just part of human work. You can tell by now that I’m a master of the bad analogy, but we humans could live the rest of our lives eating Jetsons pills, soylent whatever, but we eat fried chicken and potato salad and ice cream and pho and watermelon with salt on it because they’re delicious and they’re part of what it means to be alive. And if you spend all your time talking about what’s not possible and saying what’s imperfect and bad about people’s ideas for liberation without ever allowing yourself the expansive imaginative work of trying to conceive something else, even if just in your dreams, in your notebook, with your friends or in whispers under your breath, if you’re not doing that, then you’re not really doing the joyful work of being human, and I just don’t see the point of that.