Walking in an Empire

A child was murdered. This particular version of heartache is very old. It’s also so common now that such news washes over us. But fires have been set, and wars fought, for lesser grievances. It’s the material of myth, the prerogative of fable: a girl enters a meadow, enters the dark woods, and confronts our approximations of evil. In this case, a 15-year-old Black girl named Latasha Harlins enters a local market and forfeits her life. Of course, it’s the cultural imperative of any group of people to bar children from harm. So, we lament the loss of innocence; a child’s death, or episodes of abuse and exploitation, become our collective failure. While these narratives seem never-ending, and we continue to quarrel over extenuating circumstances, the nature of such loss is tragic and unjust. What follows other than emptiness and pain? What fills this void other than rage? What structures, what resources, remain to help us navigate this grief?

Courtney Faye Taylor takes up this challenge in her debut poetry collection, Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths as winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. While Harlins’s story provides an arc for this work, Taylor’s comprehensive vision reminds us of the precarity of Black girlhood. Concentrate is immersive partly because of its aesthetic range. Using collage, erasure, and photography, Taylor constructs a visual poetics of elegy. Violence, here, is wedded to the culture of surveillance, but Taylor’s sensitivity to layers of history is uncanny. For Black women, one might think of the “side-eye” as a form of critique and artistic investigation. Footage is obscured. Language blurs. Taylor leans into shadows. She writes into silences. These poems are like murals honoring the dead.

Taylor earned her BA from Agnes Scott College and her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she received the Hopwood Prize in Poetry. She is also the winner of the 92Y Discovery Contest and an Academy of American Poets Prize.

I lived in the gathering storm clouds before the 1992 LA Uprising. Harlins’s death and its aftermath have haunted me for 30 years. I spoke with Taylor about that via Zoom. This interview was condensed and edited.

Forgive me for leading with a simple question, but a few weeks ago, I asked a small group of first-year college students about Emmett Till, and only one raised her hand. I’m still embarrassed that I get shocked when people don’t know their own history, but here we are. Who was Latasha Harlins?

Latasha Harlins was born in 1976. She was a dancer, a fan of Bell Biv DeVoe, a great student, a fashionista. Her mother died when she was nine years old, so she was primarily raised by her grandmother and aunt in South Central Los Angeles. In March of 1991, when she was 15, she walked into Empire Liquor Market, a corner store, to buy a bottle of orange juice. The cashier, a woman named Soon Ja Du, accused her of shoplifting. There was an altercation. Words were exchanged. Latasha put the bottle of orange juice on the counter and was preparing to leave the store. And when she turned to exit, Soon Ja shot her in the back of the head. That’s what we consider Latasha’s story to be: the story of her murder. Rarely do we discuss her life as a Black girl, its precarity and its beauty.

You handle Latasha’s story with so much care. Reading this book, I feel your hands on each page. Sometimes it feels like you’re braiding the sentences, like you’re greasing a child’s scalp, tending to healthy roots. Or the way someone might tend a grave, applying oil to a stone. We have lost so many. There are too many names. Tell me about the impulse that led you to her story.

I’ve always been curious about tension between Black and Asian American communities. Growing up, I heard about it most often in the context of Black beauty supply stores, which were predominantly owned by Asian Americans. Black women would recount experiences of racial profiling in these businesses, and general feelings of distrust or discomfort when interreacting with store owners.

Concentrate started with “The Talk,” which is the second poem in the collection. That poem is a dialogue between an aunt and her niece where the aunt is giving “the race talk.” We often think of that talk as a one-and-done, sit-down conversation where the vulnerabilities of Blackness are explained to a child for the first time. But I think the race talk is more commonly a compilation of narratives we receive over time. We get the race talk when we're told to keep our hands out of our pockets in a store. We get the race talk when we're told to dress a certain way to avoid suspicion. And, as is the case in my poem, the race talk can also be a story told. The aunt tells the story of Latasha Harlins as if to say, “be very careful or what happened to Latasha could happen to you.” I think about how Black children’s murders are so often used as cautionary tales, like Emmett Till’s story, or Tamir Rice’s. When that happens, those children are reduced to their death and their stories are stripped of humanity. In writing this book, I’m trying to push beyond that and really see who Latasha was outside of her existence as a warning.  

Do you think that talk is gendered? I’m thinking about the way parenting works for Black boys versus Black girls in terms of public space.

I definitely do think it’s gendered. A lot of the conversations with Black boys are around the police and being aware of how a Black male body is perceived as a physical threat. For Black girls, the conversation can come with the added context of sexual violence. I think of the ways racial and sexual violence are so inseparable, how Black women and girls face those threats in tandem. Latasha definitely walked the world with both of those violences attached to her, and I imagine the women in her family had talks with her that took this into account.

The violence of cishet men is shadowy in your book. It’s off-camera: a murder outside of a nightclub, acts of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child molestation. Even Aaliyah’s death is figured as an extension of R. Kelly’s reach. Soon Ja Du murdered Latasha Harlins and was found guilty, but, you know, her husband wasn’t innocent. Intimate injustices led to that moment. Do you think this tragedy represents collateral damage connected to male aggression?

Yes, and male aggression, as it shows up in Latasha’s and Soon Ja’s lives, is a reality that has to be addressed. Soon Ja faced physical—and likely emotional—abuse from her husband. We see that when the police arrive at the scene of the crime and Soon Ja’s husband is slapping her. Latasha was sexually abused by a counselor at the local recreational center. She was with him the night before her murder. Even though the story of Latasha and Soon Ja is a story of white supremacist violence, and even though Soon Ja is the guilty one in that story, there’s also the story of male aggression in both their lives. Both of them are victims of that aggression.

We’re also talking about two marginalized people. It’s different than when we’re talking about white supremacy as it manifests between Black and white people. Latasha and Soon Ja, as women of color, were both subjected to racial oppression and lived lives that required daily navigation of that. I had to acknowledge both of their marginalities, and the risks and challenges of their identities.

I’m interested in your choice to use personal history as an artistic method to investigate a broader past. In this instance, the I in your poems seems singular and plural. Can you talk about the relationship between the personal and historical in this book?

As poets, we’re encouraged to definitively know who the I is in our work. But I found a lot of freedom in letting the I wander and evolve and maybe be a little unclear. The I begins as the niece, then perhaps shifts to a collective I that is all Black girls and women.  Then the I is, at times, me as the author. One place in the book where I kind of step forward as the author is in the section “Four Memorials,” where I talk about visiting LA for the first time. That section is like a very direct walk into history. I know I can’t return to the LA from 30 years ago, but in “Four Memorials” I’m trying to get as close to the past as possible and meet Latasha at the various places central to her girlhood. I’m trying to present the truest I, which is the I that captures my personal experience with this history.

The archive for this collection isn’t housed in the Schomburg, the Beinecke, or the Library of Congress; it’s painted on brick walls, scratched into the concrete of sidewalks, seeded in the upturned earth of recycled graves. As you write: “We commemorate in public—graffiti on the scalps of trains…sharpies to a bathroom stall…as a way of reclaiming the narrative of a place.”  Yours is a poetics of reclaiming echoes. Since research is a theme here, can you talk to me about your experience searching for Latasha?

Concentrate is fueled by scholarship. Dr. Brenda Stevenson’s The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins (2013) was a pivotal source. Concentrate wouldn’t exist without that text. Dr. Stevenson’s work pointed me in the direction of other scholars and artists like Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Elaine Kim, and Christine Choy, who made the documentary Sa-I-Gu. And LA 92 (2017), which is a documentary from National Geographic.

But with all that research, I still had never been to LA myself.  My first trip there happened once the book had already won the Cave Canem Prize in 2021. I went as part of my job and decided to parlay it into a research opportunity. I thought about the places I had read about in my research, the places I needed to see for myself: Empire Liquor Market, or, rather, the grounds of what used to be Empire Liquor Market. Having read in the LA Times about Latasha’s gravesite being disturbed, I knew I wanted to go to Paradise Memorial Park. [In 1995, the cemetery where Harlins is buried exhumed several bodies in an attempt to resell burial plots; the bodies were dumped in a dirt pile.] From Dr. Stevenson, I learned that Latasha met her abuser at the Algin Sutton Recreational Center, where she was on the drill team, so I wanted to visit that building. The research I did at home really guided my steps in LA.

In the beginning of “Four Memorials,” I kind of admit my imposter syndrome. Like, I wasn’t alive in 1991. I don’t live in LA, and my Black girlhood looks completely different from Latasha’s. It’s a distance I can never fully reconcile. But that trip helped me see firsthand how Latasha’s legacy still has a pulse in the city. I also think, despite the different landscape of our lives, the trip helped me see what Latasha and I share.

That sense of legacy is the connective tissue of the book. You evoke Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983), you know, and her efforts to recover Zora Neale Hurston, who had kind of slipped into the cultural ether.

Yeah.

You are in conversation with ghosts. As soon as you referred to the ancestors as “ansisters,” I promptly buckled my seatbelt. This book is haint-heavy and concludes in a graveyard. Mothers are gone (not forgotten, but gone), but the Aunties (Aunt Notrie and Latasha’s Aunt Denise) stand in as nurturers. While love isn’t a burden, these aunts are carrying too much weight.

I was raised by a single Black mother, and most of the women in my family are single. So, my upbringing was almost exclusively populated by Black women. I see the Black women in my life as sages. Especially elders who have passed away, who have become spirits I carry with me. Their legacies help me navigate the world. It’s in these women that I see who I’ll become.

Black women are also my literary guides. I talk about Toni Cade Bambara in the book. I talk about Toni Morrison. And Alice Walker. The book’s epigraph is a quote from Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was a vital mentor and friend to me. So, yeah, women are all over this book, in all sorts of ways. I even talk about Denise Harlins, Latasha’s aunt. Denise uprooted her life in the wake of Latasha’s murder. She quit her job and committed herself to social justice work and grassroots organizing. She kept Latasha’s legacy alive until her own death in 2018. That sort of love is indescribable. That sort of love is very Black.

You’re doing real recovery work in this book.

Recovery work is difficult but so rewarding. I’m attempting to present Latasha in her fullness. But I’m very sensitive to the fact that I’m writing about real people and real events with lasting consequences. I’m sensitive to the fact that I’m not an expert or an authority. As I recover her narrative, my priority is care. Honesty and care. 

I want to circle back to Black and Korean race relations. Recently, I rewatched Menace II Society with my 15-year-old son. I know; please don’t judge me for my parenting decisions! Considering the recent string of hate crimes committed against Asian Americans, the opening murder scene was difficult to watch. Of course, it’s always hard to place any violence into context. You include an erasure of this scene in your book, as well as lyrics from Ice Cube’s “Black Korea” and Tupac’s “I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto.” Can you say more about the race relations leading up to Latasha’s death?

It’s important to remember that alliances existed between Black and Korean American communities in South Central Los Angeles prior to the uprising. Throughout history—like around the Black Panther movement, for example—there was allyship from Asian American people in our movements for justice. I think about whiteness’s attempt to break and erase that solidarity. The model minority myth was created to literally pit Black and Asian American people against one another. The myth blames Black people for their subjugation and at the same time erases the oppression Asian American folks experience. Once we get to the riots in LA in 1992, we’re bombarded with white media coverage about violence between Black and Asian American communities rather than coverage about the economic injustice, police brutality, and white racism that fueled the uprising in the first place. Black media also upholds this narrative of conflict in some ways. It’s seen in Menace II Society and other Black films from the ’90s. It’s heard in music like Ice Cube’s “Black Korea.” And, yes of course, there was conflict, but it’s a failure to highlight that conflict without acknowledging the cause or the longstanding examples of unity between us.

You’re also a visual artist, and collage is very important in this collection. Names and faces overlap, almost blurring identity, as if these tragedies are interchangeable, or as if time collapses.  Can you talk about that in terms of organizational strategy?

There are some realities that words alone can’t convey. There are some experiences and truths that I need the reader to see. That’s what I love about visual poetics. It’s a form that uses concrete imagery as language. There’s a visual poem that’s broken up across Concentrate that uses pictures of Black women and girls that I found on missing persons flyers. I make a collage of the images and the words used on the flyers. In that poem, I’m really thinking about the violence of being forgotten, but also about the violence of being reduced to stereotypical characteristics. I’m thinking about this medium of the missing persons flyer, which is meant to stand in for a human being, and give you enough details to potentially find them, but also to determine what kind of person they are. Sometimes if these flyers are about women who committed a crime, you get certain information about their lifestyle, details that criminalize them even further. I could write a poem about all of that, or I could just show you what this violence looks like.  

The “Black Korea” collage uses pictures that I took inside a beauty supply store in 2013, before I even had the idea to write this book. At the store’s checkout counter, there were surveillance images of Black women who had presumably shoplifted. Their names were written on the pictures, as well as their role in the crime. So, one woman was labeled as the shoplifter and the other was the driver or accomplice. The display was a warning for the two women if they ever came back into the store, but it was also a warning for me. It alerted me to how I might be perceived, how I might be watched, how I might be interrogated. I became much more aware of my body in that space. I wasn’t just a shopper anymore. I was a potential threat.

That counter display took me to Ice Cube’s song “Black Korea,” where he’s unleashing his anger about being profiled in Asian American businesses. In the song, he uses racially insensitive terms like “oriental” and “chop suey.” When I created the visual poem with his lyrics, I took out those phrases and left open brackets in their place. I didn’t want to recreate his harm. But my editors and I talked about how those words give an honest view of the rage and conflict that defined that time. The violence of those words is the point. So, I put them back in.

There are so many ethical questions when you’re revisiting these traumatic moments in history. Like, what does it mean to look directly at the subject versus look away? When do you want firsthand knowledge and when are you OK with a critical distance?

I feel like I always try my best to look directly at the subject. I want to see as much as there is to see. I think that kind of direct vantage is integral to honesty.

I spent a lot of time hyper-fixating on “getting it right.” I wanted to make sure I was saying the right thing, having the right perspective, analyzing all the concepts correctly. But over time, I understood that there isn’t one right way to get it. I just need to get it true. I just need to get it honest. I just need to get it with care.

Thinking about Concentrate as a whole body, a whole book, not one hair and not one thread is out of place. Structurally, it’s almost like an act of braiding. Multiple strands pull tightly together, overlap and interlock. For example, you return to certain words like concentrate, Arizona, paradise, sentence, pass, past, passed. Or names, the -iquas and -ishas, the Tonis, as you mentioned, Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara. You write, “My full name is / my mother’s sole crack at poetry and here / I am, privileged to haul it like a tax / bracket or a satchel or proof.” Can you talk about the function of language here?

For some reason, I’m really interested in moments of misspeaking or mishearing. In the first section, “Arizona?,” we get the conversation between the aunt and niece, and there’s this confusion about whether the aunt is talking about Arizona the tea drink or Arizona the state. There’s an assumption that she’s talking about Trayvon Martin when she’s really talking about Latasha Harlins. That misunderstanding points at how so many stories of murdered Black children overlap. That misunderstanding comes to represent the general misunderstanding of white supremacy, the misunderstanding of the details, the misunderstanding of who’s at fault.

Past and passed are presented as mistakes throughout the book. When the speaker should be using past, she uses pass or vice versa. I like the interchangeability of these words. When I think of pass, I think about having no pass, like, there’s no pass for us, no exception made, no way around the violence. Or pass as in to fly under the radar, to go undetected, which as a Black person means survival and safety. I’m also thinking of “to pass away” and how gentle and unassuming that phrase is, despite death being anything but. And, of course, the book deals deeply in the “the past,” in history, in what we choose to remember.

And, yes, the repetition of -iquas and -ishas, the suffixes of Black girls’ names. I think about the assumptions made of Black girls based on their names. I think of the assumptions made of Latasha based on her name, her age, her color. Those racist assumptions cost her her life. They cost so many Black girls’ their lives.  

By the end of the book, I feel like I’ve traveled a great distance. But I also feel frozen still. Like I haven’t moved an inch. Maybe I’m an Afropessimist, so I’m at peace with the absence of resolution. Can you say more about where the book rests?

Another word that repeats in the book is forever. “Forever, fraught word, ain’t it,” appears earlier in the book and then we end on it. Ending the book on forever is like I’m asking the reader: What can last? Maybe what lasts is what we make last. By writing this book, can I make Latasha’s story and the stories of Black girls last forever?

I’m thinking about wellness as a part of the story. Maybe it’s ironic, but Latasha attempts to purchase orange juice. Not Mountain Dew, not Sunny D, not Snapple, you know, not even a Yoo-hoo, right? She wasn’t buying Funyuns or a Hostess cupcake. She was thirsty. Maybe she wanted something sweet. But she was concerned about her health. Does this add to her tragedy?

Yeah, I’m really taken by the innocence of orange juice. It makes me think of Trayvon Martin’s Skittles—juice and candy are the ultimate symbols of childhood to me. These items just remind you: we’re talking about a child.

There were poems in an earlier version of Concentrate about the history of orange juice. Frozen concentrated orange juice was created to give soldiers Vitamin C during World War II. And it quickly became the all-American breakfast drink. It’s bright. It’s refreshing. It’s in direct contrast to what Latasha went through. Here she is, a Black girl walking into a store to buy orange juice—such a mundane, everyday, American act. I’m thinking about the painful irony of that. The tragedy of that.