Talk It Out

In “nigger joke,” a poem near the beginning of Nate Marshall’s trenchant new collection, Finna (One World, 2020), racist humor gets turned on its head by presenting the butt of the joke as its protagonist. In a scene that has undoubtedly played out in countless “gentrifying neighborhood[s],” the poem’s Black protagonist, armed with a craft beer and a graduate degree, strikes up a conversation in a bar with an aging white man who has bought numerous properties in the area while “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” Readers are left waiting for it also, as the racially fraught word in the poem's title reacts quietly on the page, hovering in the background as the pair discuss their mutual ties to a college town, and the white man mentions his cop brothers and his Catholic religion. Suddenly, he expresses his aggrieved status by hurling the verbal equivalent of spit in the narrator’s face: “i never been oppressed except one time & he says in Virginia everybody’s a nigger.”

The narrator quickly finishes his fried chicken, rebuffing the white man’s feigned attempt at an apology and his comments about “the protestors who are probably college students who should probably protest college tuition & not cops doing their jobs.” The narrator—now identifying himself as the “nigger joke”—ignores the white man and says a prayer “his mama taught him”:

[T]he good elementary school & then the good high school & then the excellent college & then the incredible graduate school & how it was all merit scholarship & also the high test scores including the awards & honors of course the publications & acclaim […] & the nigger joke pays the waitress & tells the white man have a good night & cries the walk home.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the heaviest item is the notion that, to a Black person, status and accolades are essentially worthless if one can still be mowed down (verbally or otherwise) in the public sphere. In this instance, the language that allowed the speaker to pull himself up becomes his undoing. That is, of course, if one assumes the primacy of another culture’s language over one’s own. That is the presupposition Marshall spends most of Finna trying to dismantle.

Marshall, a native of the West Pullman neighborhood, on the South Side of Chicago, is now an assistant professor at Colorado College. In addition to an illustrious academic and publishing career—a BA from Vanderbilt and an MFA from the University of Michigan; fellowships from Cave Canem, the Poetry Foundation, and the University of Michigan; and an award-winning debut, Wild Hundreds (2015)—he also founded Crescendo Literary. The organization develops community-engaged arts events and educational resources as a form of cultural organizing, which he co-directs with the poet Eve Ewing. (Crescendo has produced several joint projects in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.) Marshall is also a member of the Dark Noise Collective with fellow poets Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Aaron Samuels, Danez Smith, and Jamila Woods. Although the group has not been regularly active in recent years, its twitter bio describes it as “a multiracial, multi-genre collective of some of today's most exciting poets.” The Poetry Foundation, from which several members have received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship, characterizes the collective’s activities as “find[ing] common ground in ... using art as a site for radical truth-telling. They explore themes of identity, intersectionality, trauma, and healing in accessible forms without sacrificing the highest standards of poetic craft.”

A vested interest in interrogating racial and sexual politics within the history of the marginalized United States is perhaps the only thing these poets have in common. Ewing has a background in sociology and is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago; Woods is a singer/songwriter and a poet. Marshall has a sporadic career as a rapper; his last album, Grown, came out in 2015 with the group Daily Lyrical Product. But even more integral to their kinship than “explod[ing] archaic notions of page vs. stage,” as the collective’s bio put it, is the radicalization of the aesthetic sphere.

The era in which poetic esteem lends itself to an eventual embrace of the mainstream, whereby popular poets supposedly exemplify race- and class-blind ascension, appears over, despite the loose network of awards, grants, and fellowships poets often cobble together to sustain themselves. In the first year of the 2020s, perhaps it makes sense to draw a comparison with the ‘20s—arguably the last time in which an abundance of talent overlapped so acutely with a generational sensibility. Anxiety, bad sex, survivors contending with the casualties of war: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” set the table for much of Modernism. But as evidenced by his royalist conversion, T.S. Eliot never said he didn’t want any part of the status quo, just that it was excruciating to live through at the time.

Contemporary poetry makes no such compromises. The price readers must pay to experience “beauty” and “brilliance” is the admission that many mechanisms that make such lofty adjectives possible in the first place are hegemonic, oppressive, and exclusionary, with Finna serving as exhibit W. (The book’s title, shorthand for the southern phrase fixing to, would be corrected in British standard English to about to or going to.) One can’t read “after we stopped rap,” a where-are-they-now about the post-cipher lifestyle that runs the gamut from death to suburban dads to doctorates, and not feel that the poetic playing field has been realigned. Toni Morrison once stated a desire to write from the margins and let the center gaze in her direction. Marshall’s work fulfills the promise of that dictum by taking for granted that the margins are the center—not of the universe but of someone’s:

wherever we rest our heads
& hear a passing car
with the familiar thump
of a beat through too-thin apartment walls
or the bleeding beat of a chorus
of crickets with a slick tempo
we nod.
we remain
heads.
we tip our temples
to this morse code.

The atmosphere isn’t as relevant as what the poem describes: a specialized method of communication that can be learned, technically, but that’s reserved for initiates on account of its esoteric nature. Everyone knows about rap music, but not everyone will try to actually make it. Paradoxically, the private nature of the communication is laid bare for anyone willing to look. What the poem requests from readers isn’t comprehension (that spendthrift coin) but the right to communicate as one sees fit in the open without consequence.

Marshall is very aware of the cost of silence. “my grandaddy sees the streets” examines the effects of hereditary brutality, with the older generation able to offer only violence to “little men who never got a proper whipping” because, in their household, an “ass whooping” served as the fallback solution. Meanwhile, “African american literature” repeats the same line—“i like your poems because they seem so real”—13 times before alerting readers in the last line that the poem is a sonnet. The monotony serves as both example and exercise; the poem’s speaker simultaneously mimics the exhaustion of the white gaze while preserving his autonomy through writing in traditional forms. It’s not that Marshall et al. can’t write that way. The critique lies in charting another path, one on which Black people actively define the terms by which they’re valued.

Yet some things are out of one’s control, such as one’s place of origin or what one is called. A recurring theme of Finna, most evident in a section titled “The Other Nate Marshall,” is how Marshall’s relatively common surname lends itself to imagining alternative lives for the poet based on race and class. “I tell my students about you the day when we wonder what if privilege hadn’t put us in a college classroom,” Marshall writes in “Nate Marshall is a white supremacist from Colorado or Nate Marshall is a poet from the South Side of Chicago or i love you Nate Marshall.” His doppelganger (at least in name), a shingle salesman who ran a failed campaign for public office, is incredulous that a Black man can have more notoriety on the internet than he does. “[Y]ou need to quit using my name,” the white Nate Marshall insists in “another Nate Marshall origin story,” adding, “it is not your name. you are fake! i am Nate Marshall. you are filth!” That anyone would take the chance occurrence of a birth name personally is absurd—but so is racism. The irony of a descendent of slaves being asked to rescind a name he never asked for, after spending a lifetime to ascribe purpose to it, wipes the proverbial slate clean so that our Nate Marshall can render the world in his image:

demographics: 35 percent Missibamaisiana-isms from the Up
South old folks. 20 percent
magnet school doublespeak. 15 percent white girl whispering in
the suburbs or summer camps.
18 percent too many rap records. 12 percent my mom’s work
voice.

This breakdown is from “welcome to how the hell i talk,” one of many etymological gauntlets thrown down in the book. “Only 1 for whitefolk using Black language” situates linguistic appropriation, a perpetually contested topic, within the metaphor of entering someone’s house as a guest (“understand, if you treat the fam like strangers, then you a stranger, fam.”). Although the title poem is a moving dedication to students at Perspectives Leadership Academy in Chicago about their potential as is, rather than as the world would like them to be, its gesturing toward infinite possibilities doesn’t register as strongly as “&nem,” the poem that follows it and that ends the book. In previous poems, the personal becomes political insomuch as Marshall categorizes the emotional responses that certain words, or phrases, conjure. “took a L fam” spends several lines explaining what it does not mean in the poem’s context (a blunt; a nickname for the Chicago Transit Authority) before hammering home what it does mean (a death) with a haunting image of a half-empty bed still left with an impression of the departed. “hecky naw”—hecky being slang for hell, and a word that became generation-defining for Chicagoans when Kanye West sang it on The College Dropout in 2004—brings back youthful memories of almost-cusses from moms who refuse second helpings, and of better basketball players denying entry into pick-up games. Giving poetic shape to these words allows readers to identify with the speaker, which in turn disarms the othering of language that isn’t “correct” when spoken aloud. It’s fitting, then, that Marshall ends this rigorous, multifaceted collection by declaring why that matters as a gesture:

 ... every time you decided i was acceptable
or articulate or actually okay
you don’t know who you let in.
you let in my mama
&my daddy
&my greasy grandmammy
&my hood
&my woes
&all the folks who taught my flows
&my thugs
&my killers
&all the ones you think are drug dealers
[...]
&my fine fine fine
people
&nem.

Like the line separating rap music and poetry, the respectability politics that prefaces Marshall’s vision of a bum rush of Blackness charging the gatekeeper’s door also appears antiquated. In June, more than 2,000 poets, critics, scholars, and readers, including Ewing, Marshall, and virtually all of the Dark Noise Collective, signed an open letter boycotting this very institution until Henry Bienen, the president of the Poetry Foundation, and Willard Bunn, III, the board chairman, resigned. The dispute was in response to what the letter characterized as the Foundation’s “worse than the bare minimum” response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others, which resulted in massive nationwide protests and shake ups within media, publishing, and several other industries. In addition to the resignations, the letter also called for “a meaningful statement that details the specific, material ways [the Poetry Foundation] plans to ‘work to eradicate institutional racism’”; a “well-researched acknowledgment of the debt that the foundation owes to Black poets”; and for “the redistribution of wealth toward efforts fostering social justice.”

That was June 6; on June 10, Bienen and Bunn resigned, and on June 26, Don Share, the editor of Poetry magazine, announced he would step down at the end of the summer. The status of the other demands remains a work in progress. (So far, the Foundation has committed at least $1 million in funding over the next two years, agreed to partner with a Black historian or a team of Black historians to research and document the debt the organization owes to Black poets, and vowed to preserve important out-of-print books by Black poets and presses, among other reforms.) What is clear, however, is the subversive impact of being deemed “acceptable” by institutions that promote diversity for the sake of “virtue” or optics while nonetheless holding onto conceits—meritocracy, fake it until you make it—that are markedly different from the experiences of the contributors from whom those institutions profit. What can august institutions do in the face of wholesale revolts other than hand sledgehammers to the invited guests who have united to demo the house?