Names of Love

In Danez Smith’s new collection, Homie (Graywolf, 2020), one has to stop and ponder the inscription page. There’s a lot of subtle plot there. It reads “Note On Title Page … this book was titled homie because I don’t want non-black people to say my nig out loud. this book is really titled my nig.”

I’m fascinated by this beginning, this pseudo false start that still presents an in to the work. Ever since the days of the Harlem Niggerati, during which Black weirdos parsed what Blackness should be, the question—posed damn near 100 years ago—still remains in the hands of the modern Black poet: how does one appropriately behave under the omnipresent white gaze? For the sake of keeping it simple, the only real answer is this: however the fuck one feels like. In a world in which an average famous black rapper seemingly has no problem with a roomful of white people crowing nigga at the top of their lungs, there’s something to be said for the imposed reserve in Smith’s book. Smith (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) doesn’t propose an attempted escape velocity out of white supremacy here nor are they bound in a straitjacket of respectability. They are simply saying they are not Jay-Z and you, dear non-Black reader, will not drop any n-bombs around their verse, OK?

That said, there’s something a little prissy about it. I mean, my nig, like, damn, really? No hard r; not even another g. Prissy indeed, but considering the eloquent poems that follow, the swag is on point. It’s almost as if Smith is saying, “I'm not putting out on the first page for you—perhaps not ever—and if I choose to, you’re gonna have to wait for it.” (And the wait is well worth it.) Also, it’s a tease. Rest assured, this collection drops the word nigga about as many times as a John Singleton movie, but I digress.

Smith’s verse in Homie, their third full-length collection, is active and concrete. It rarely strays off into the aesthetic sunset, pondering its own beauty. In the first poem, “My President,” Smith doesn’t declare “I want a dyke for president” as Zoe Leonard did in her infamous 1992 poem. No, Smith starts “today, I elect …,” and then invokes a psychic roll call of all those people, places, things, and feelings that would safely govern, if not the United States, at least the nooks, crannies, and comfort zones of the poet’s own imagination. Everyone from Rihanna to the kid selling candy outside Walgreens is illuminated, exalted, and, most important, drawn to human scale with an explicit dignity reminiscent of Whitman:

& my auntie, only a few months clean, but clean
she is my president
 
                        & my neighbor who holds the door open when my arms
                        are full of laundry is my president
 
& every head nod is my president
 
        & every child singing summer with a red sweet tongue is my president

The hypothetical presidents-elect feel both like ghosts (they have an ectoplasmic quality, as if they could move through walls: “& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air / bent toward a branch, throwing apples down toward the children and vets”) and like full-fledged humans from any given city USA. Put another way, each character feels like a patchwork quilt, and if this poem itself were a blanket, I would wrap myself in it. Actually, scratch that, bury me in this motherfucker—it’s that absolute.

In “niggas!,” a thrilling ode to that oh-so-troubling word, Smith revels in their unabashed joy of Black vernacular. I could write an entire essay about the exclamation point in the title or about the poem’s wordplay, evident even in the first line of the first stanza, in which Smith declares “love them two g’s in the middle.” Dre’s “Ain’t Nothin’ But A G Thang” would be an excellent accompaniment to this poem, as Smith concludes by linking themself to a lineage that includes “all the g’s that made me / & all the g’s before / & all the g’s before.” The poem celebrates the distinctive camaraderie afforded by that most perfect of words: nigga. It’s a word that affirms its brutal, heavy root (nigger); it’s compact; it rolls off the tongue; and it’s gender-neutral to boot. What’s not to love?

These opening poems impart good, warm vibes similar to ’80s and ’90s Black R&B radio. They’re the literary equivalent of sampled old-school soul jams layered with fresh riffs (a later poem is actually titled “self-portrait as ’90s R&B video”). It’s a peculiar layering, though, that reiterates the extent to which time and consciousness are amorphous and omnipresent rather than linear. The poem “how many of us have them”—a nod to “Friends,” the ’80s rap track by Whodini—swaggers to the point of implosion, and I mean implosion in a good way:

don’t save me, i don’t wanna be saved.
i been died laughing before, been seen
god’s face & you have her teeth, my nig.
but    hers    ain’t as yellow    as    them    saffron shits
you   keep   stashed   in your   gloryfoul mouth
my friend! my friends! my niggas! my wives!
i got a crush on each one of your dumb faces
smashing into my heart like idiot cardinals into glass
but i am a big-ass glass bird, a stupid monster
[…]
who i would legit stomp a nigga for, do you feel me?
when they buried my nigga i put on my Timbs
walked into that hot August tried to beat his name
out the dirt. i beat the earth like a nigga.
i threw hands at the earth like a punk muhfucka
& the ground chuckled, said my nigga what is you doing?!

Themes of Black-on-Black friendship, partner-in-crime dynamics on top of eros, and the shattering realization of the world that impedes such unions culminates in longing. In the words of Etta James, it “make me wanna holler / and throw up both my hands.” Again, I’m talking about implosion.

“Jumped!” moves through the childhood rite of passage of getting one’s ass beat. That is a common ritual, which the poem prolongs and itemizes, although it also suggests a sort of freeze frame of that moment right before the blow lands on one’s face. It humanizes both the attackers and the victim, all of whom share the rules, hierarchies, and codes of the block:

                        We pool our punches into the boy
            like quarters for a bag of flaming hots.
 
           we make him look like a bag of flaming hots.
lord forgive me but I don’t regret it
 
                       & on the real all these summers later
           i miss it. i wish a little bit to gather round
 
           a man & stomp in the name of love
beat what he said about my next to blood
 
                       back into his gleeyellow mouth, to make
           his mouth a sparkling smashed tomato.

How many of us have been in thrall to the universal rule of childhood that being any kid who snitches on another kid is a dead kid? I am both fascinated and terrified by the implications and indisputable truth of the poem: there is shared joy in communal violence, and childhood by design is cruel.

“Saw A Video,” the following poem, seems partly a non sequitur remix of “Jumped.” “We are in their love” repeats itself as a textual border enclosing the main text of the poem. Am I to understand this poem as a body? It certainly seems so. “We are in their love” acts as the skin and bones protecting the inner organs of the text, which itself toggles between themes of love and violence:

honey bitch
you kin me
so good i would
kill on sight
if you asked
gun knife or bite
a man down
to bloodnectar

Several other poems read like echo chambers of time, memory, and the cyclical seasons of one’s own life. The quartet of “Fall Poem,” “rose,” “I’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense,” and “the flower who bloomed thru the fence in grandmama’s yard” coexist in a sort of ghostly call and response. “Fall Poem” deftly segues from the eponymous season to the national crisis of premature Black death:  

[…] no one
 
wants to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen
body, something easy to mourn, body cut out of the light
body lit up with bullets. see how easy it is to bring up bullets?

“rose,” an apostrophe to a bullied classmate, continues the theme of lost innocence and disrupted childhood:

[…] we were
so mean. i was the bastard fuck in the mob of bastard fucks. the easily
swayed torch. o rose, saint of getting roasted in the hallway, warrior
queen of the misfits, my love, how did you survive us?

“i’m going back to Minnesota …” and “the flower who bloomed …” further connect seasonal allusions to themes of Black displacement and tragedy. “i know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful,” Smith writes in the former; in the latter, they ask “why you running from / what still rooted where you started / who the ghost who haunt your dirt.” These four poems leave me with an afterburn of deep sadness and concern for the figurative fall and winter of Black lives in the United States.

Elsewhere in the collection, poems grapple with the systems of race, class, and morality that trouble intersectional queer identity. “on faggotness” cuts through the haze with the precision of a blade:

[…] the first time i remember.
being called that kind. mother’s room. mother’s mirror. mother’s dress. spinning.
some small song. grand. pa said. that boy gonna be a. faggot. i didn’t. know what it
meant. but it had to be. akin to king. or mighty. different. a good kind. but then i
looked it up in his eyes. saw my body upside down.

The poem starts at the common root: a confrontation over identity embedded in direct patriarchal and maternal lineage. It’s an all-too-common story for many of us. The word faggot was lobbed well before we understood what sex was, much less understood the fraught landmine of same-sex desire. Smith’s poem reaches through the proverbial mirror and connects to that confused, universal child forced to examine the question “who am I/what am I?” It addresses the essential conundrum of queer childhood, in which we must initiate habits of psychic armor while our normative friends simply get to exist as is, playing with dump trucks or Barbies unmolested.

“Undetectable” celebrates the daily ritual of an HIV regimen. Smith, who is HIV-positive, offers a pointed paean to the “pale green pill” Genvoya, used to treat HIV, rather than to the blue pill Truvada (known as PrEP), taken to prevent HIV. The poem draws a distinction between the PrEP boys and those who are already infected, and in our current age of PrEP ads replacing HIV care ads, it also illuminates an us versus them dichotomy. I think here about a line from Mac Barnett’s children’s book The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse (2017), in which the Duck and the Mouse have made a home inside the Wolf’s belly. “I may have been swallowed,” the Duck says, “but I have no intention of being eaten.” Likewise, “Undetectable” suggests that in a country infatuated by self-care, the notion of resilience, of one day at a time, isn’t just a banal mantra but quite literally a pill one swallows every day and that this do-or-die journey isn’t a sprint but a lifelong marathon.

“All the good dick lives in Brooklyn Park” continues the theme of the lack of health care for HIV-positive Black bodies: “i swear / buddy who rocks me best gets thinner by the day. / he can’t afford the pills that keep me round & blood quiet.” On top of this trouble is the fact that Black neighborhoods have always been sites of cultural consumerism. Even now, Black neighborhoods are where the status quo goes to find its music, its drugs, its nurses, its nannies, its prison population, and its sex. The poem’s subtext is that “all the good dick lives in Brooklyn Park” where there’s “no grocery store in miles & there’s / a liquor store next to a liquor store next to / a little caesars,” but given the epidemic of gentrification, how long will the title of this poem hold true?

One of the book’s most triumphant poems is “notes” (and perhaps it’s of note that it follows “my nig,” the title piece of the book, and is also the final poem):

dear suicide
 
               you made my kin thin air.
               his entire body dead as hair.
               you said his name like a dare.
               you’ve done your share.
               i ride down lake street friendbare
               to lake of isles, wet pairs
               stare back & we compare
               our mirror glares. fish scare
               into outlines, i blare
               a moon’s wanting, i wear
               their faces on t-shirts, little flares
               in case i bootleg my own prayer
               & submit to your dark affair.
               tell me they’re in your care.
                                                    be fair.
               heaven or hell, i hope my niggas’ all there
               if i ever use the air as a stair.

The last three lines could be the thesis for the entire collection, although the book discourages such reductive readings. As a writer, I have always rejected the very old and very dead notion that for writing to be “good” or “successful,” it must have a clear thesis, a supporting argument, and an ending. That’s what some of us refer to, in Black vernacular, as cracker bullshit.

The truest forms of Black time, Black feeling, and Black existence occupy a continuum not bound by hierarchies. These forms cannot, and must not, be reduced to the stifling coffin of linear time, linear process, or linear thought. In Homie, Smith synthesizes their feelings with one hand in the past and a firm grasp on the present (we need not mention the future, as the present and past are the future).

Homie could very well be a nonbinary response to Nikki Giovanni’s Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978). Like that predecessor, Homie is a collection rich in synthesis and observation, and it’s Smith’s declaration of “this is everything I know about this, trust me.” There is no essentialism; Smith isn’t trying to sell Blackness back to us. Their earnestness and honesty give readers license to trust the poet’s voice and to cherish it. I think all good poetry should be like a bible one keeps on the shelf and turns to in times of distress, fatigue, or when needing reassurance that every strife can be named and every discontent has been seen before. This collection is such a bible. I would gladly live inside it.