Show of Force

Let’s start with the obvious. Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the landmark 2015 report from the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, is not a work of poetry. It is a 102-page government document that outlines local law enforcement practices and comes to the irrefutable conclusion, as stated in the first paragraph, that there is a “pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.”

How do we respond when those tasked with enforcing the law break it—not as an exception but as a rule? What do we do with the knowledge that the police force was designed to protect capital? The DOJ investigation, which began in September 2014, a month after 18-year-old Michael Brown was murdered, used police records, data on arrests, citations, stops and searches, and interviews with local residents and organizations to make its points not about the violence of police forces generally but about the violence of a specific department in suburban St. Louis: the now metonymic Ferguson. At the center of the report, though, are also national and global anxieties about safety, race, policing, and justice.

When The Ferguson Report, as the DOJ document is now known, was published on March 4, 2015, the media consensus was clear. The Los Angeles Times, the BBC, the Guardian, and Vox all called it “damning.” The Washington Post and The New York Times referred to it as “scathing.” A week later, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson resigned, receiving a year of severance pay.

But for Ferguson residents, this official report didn’t exactly “reveal” anything. Even before Officer Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown, Black people in Ferguson intimately knew that the law didn’t offer them protection and that the anti-Blackness of the police force was mired in capitalist forms of power and the financialization of incarceration, a never-ending cycle of charges, arrests, fines, legal fees, and court appearances.

Nicole Sealey’s new collection, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Knopf, 2023), takes the DOJ’s account and crosses it out, literally and selectively, so that what remains is an utterly unique work. “Who among us / is stunned by how fast rain / pours from the sky?” Sealey asks, not anticipating an answer. Who indeed is allowed to be stunned by the DOJ’s version of what happened in Ferguson?

Regarding the subtitle of Sealey’s book: the prose text is doubly “erased” by both lightening the gray Adobe Garamond font and striking it through. This erasure leaves a trace. Though one could in fact read the DOJ’s Ferguson Report in its entirety in Sealey’s book, though it might strain the eyes and the mind, making the text available is not her project. After all, a PDF is freely accessible on the DOJ website, and in the summer of 2015, The New Press published the report in paperback and ebook editions.

By asking readers to engage with The Ferguson Report now, almost a decade after its release, Sealey shows how little has changed politically or judicially. She insists on (re)reading the bureaucratic text, in which death is ever present, to move about imaginatively. In Sealey’s words, “What’s an answer / to black, I wonder?” This wondering is a poetic tactic for interpreting anti-Black violence.

Though they share a name, Sealey’s Ferguson Report and the DOJ’s Ferguson Report are radically different documents. Intertextuality here goes beyond the fetish of literary allusion. Most important, the identical names suggest the possibility of multiple Ferguson reports: the DOJ’s, Sealey’s, the various Ferguson communities’, and the reports readers might never encounter. By titling the book The Ferguson Report, Sealey not only invites us to (re)visit and (re)read the original report but also to consider its afterlife—what changed or did not change in the intervening eight years?

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Erasure poetry, or blackout poetry, is an experimental style, often with a postmodern sensibility, that erases or obscures a source text to create poetry from the fragments that remain visible. Examples are numerous: two that come to mind are Ronald Johnson’s rewriting of John Milton in RADI OS (1977) and Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo (2008), which begins from The 9/11 Commission Report. But most prominent in connection with Sealey’s work is the anti-narrative, book-length poem Zong! (2008), by M. NourbeSe Philip, which uses as its source text the brief Gregson v. Gilbert case report that recounts the legalized massacre by drowning of 130 enslaved Africans in 1781.

In this light, Sealey’s book is in sync with a tradition of Anglophone postcolonial literary criticism concerned with a structural metropole/colony dyad that demands writers unlearn colonial education and speak back to empire. An obvious example is the title of Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, which is a reference to Irish poet W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” thus establishing this canonical postcolonial text’s affiliation with Modernism. In this case, the empire Sealey is speaking back to is the American empire, whose “post-ness” is often debated according to one’s ideological position.

Because of the provenance of the source text, Sealey’s Ferguson Report emerges as an idiosyncratic laboratory for reading practices. She forces readers to engage with the government’s narrative, though at a distance. Shaping how readers engage with the DOJ’s report, her material includes modulated reorganizations of violence, written in vexed conversation with a partial revelation of a “policing culture” of discrimination, a lack of accountability, gratuitous violence, unlawful acts, aggression, harm, repression of criticism, stereotyping, racism, bias, and unreasonability (to use the language of the DOJ).

Sealey’s book is organized into nine sections that follow the contours of the report itself. Part 1, for example, follows the first 12 pages of the DOJ’s report; part 2 follows the next eight pages, and so on. By follow, I mean Sealey reproduces the report while simultaneously effacing it. But it would be naïve to go back and forth between the two texts, as a comparative literature student does with the original and its translation, trying to note commensurability and incommensurability.

Sealey completely foreignizes the DOJ’s Ferguson Report, displacing the notion of an original. The move from one context (judicial) to another (poetic) succeeds in creating a wholly new text. The DOJ report’s summary forms the background of Sealey’s first page—ghostly, subliminal, struck-through. As the book goes on, this gray subtext insistently draws readers’ attention, troubling the distinction between background and foreground and even the supposed hierarchy between the two.

Sealey’s own first word, her first intervention, appears about a quarter way down the first page: horses. But the letters are spaced so the word is not immediately legible. The difficulty comes on slowly. The letters are surrounded by the faintly colored space of the gray font. Trying to read the poem aloud entails stops and starts, stutters, hesitations. For all the space there seems to be on the page, this is a claustrophobic text, counterintuitive in its organization. Sounding it out during my first encounter, I read that opening word as whore.

Beginning with an animal, then, Sealey’s lines, bubbling up from but not reducible to the DOJ’s document, inscribe sentience into a zone of brutalization and bring the history of chattel slavery into the report’s orbit. In a 2020 essay published in the academic journal Critical Inquiry, Robert Gooding-Williams, a professor at Columbia University, insisted that readers look beyond the lens of “discrete individuals” as set out in the DOJ’s report. Drawing on John Locke’s figure of the criminal in the Second Treatise of Government, Gooding-Williams wrote

It is reasonable to characterize the concept of criminality that was operative in the [Ferguson Police Department’s] practice of policing black neighborhoods as a racist, antiblack concept: a concept that authorizes citizens to infer, from the consideration that a fellow citizen is black, that he, she, or they is/are an outlaw—broadly speaking, a deviant whose beliefs, character, capabilities, and/or behavior contravenes conventional and mainstream norms and expectations, thereby rendering that person a misfit, an inferior, a dysfunctional blight on civil society, a threat to law and order, or, at the very limit, something other than human.

Something other than human. As is usual in Sealey’s poetic texts, readers are torn between figurations of difference. The Ferguson Report is in lockstep with the imagistic explorations of death and what it is to be human in Sealey’s previous books, her debut collection Ordinary Beast (2017) and the chapbook The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (2016). In addition to the aforementioned horse, Sealey’s latest work features a leashed dog choking itself as it pulls against the grip of its collar, straining body and voice. This archetypal figure demonstrates the perils of communication—i.e., voicing pain—when the state frames the discourse through which speech can be produced and negotiated. There is always the risk that people might say the wrong thing or, worse, choke themselves out in the process.

For me, rereading the DOJ’s report while writing this essay, it is not the conclusion—the institution of policing is racist—but the supporting examples that are particularly trenchant. An unnamed “African-American Woman” was issued a $151 fine for parking her car illegally in 2007. That case, which was still pending when the report was published, resulted in two arrests, numerous fees, and six days in jail. And the woman still owed $541 at the time the report was published. It’s a chilling case but chilling in its banality because readers can assume by the directness of the DOJ’s statement that the Ferguson Police Department violates the law, and so do many other police departments across the country. The DOJ neatly links the part to the whole, that is, the relationship between particular cases, such as this woman’s parking fine and the larger carceral institution in the US. The rhetoric of exemplarity, shaped by the poetic text, forecloses transcendence; Sealey asks readers to see the play between the general and the particular as something that cannot be fixed. She disorganizes the whole and the desire to “prove” something. Instead, her text is motivated by a rather spontaneous practice: her particulars are imaginary.

Underscoring the precariousness of the noun report, Sealey poeticizes her experience of rereading the text, offering both a reading and a refusal of the DOJ’s findings. After the poetry, in an appendix-like section titled “about the work,” she writes

I began erasing The Ferguson Report to further engage with its findings. The report guided my entry into worlds both real and imagined. Reimagining a reality in which the outcome is often death is perhaps a step toward bringing about an alternative reality, one in which life might prevail.

The text itself, though, not this note, shows readers exactly how to read this book while also theorizing its condition of possibility. The book is transformed into a record of the author’s attempt to engage with and ultimately transcend reality.

I’ve talked a lot about form, but what are Sealey’s poems actually about? If they can be said to be about anything in a conventional narrative sense, a list of themes might suffice: human-animal divisions (“horses” and “a Barking Dog,” “a deer,” “that particular beast,” “they deploy canines to bite”), an engagement with the natural world (“the wild,” “the high grass,” “then the birds began to fly low and patternless,” the “blue clouds,” “some fragrant flower that unfurls”), the regulative logic of force, the endlessness of death—“Whoever said death comes in threes is an optimist”—memory’s relationship to history, anti-Blackness, state violence, surveillance, childhood, pretend guns, captivity, wildness, execution, the sensorium—“sounds of flags beaten to shreds by wind”—music, and painting—“put down one color Bearden thought.”

In section four, Sealey relentlessly emphasizes force’s multiple meanings in a poetic drumbeat that resembles a school lesson:

use-of-force. Force
of habit. Of nature. Force
feed. Force down. Force
his hand. Force in line.
Full force. By force. Show
of force. Brute force. Blunt
force to be reckoned with.

This litany of heterogenous forces reminds readers of the structure of Sealey’s text as a poetic text, dramatizing its literariness.

She might even insist too much, acquiescing, in the final instance, to the conventions of literary form. Before the text operated almost as one long poem, reveling in a radical unintelligibility—disembodied voices, word after word after word; the final section, “lifted poems,” captures readerly effort like a butterfly in a jar. There, Sealey lineates her fragments into traditional verse, almost like a concession:

Horses, hundreds, neighing—
part reflex, part reason,
part particular urge.
At gunpoint, among them,
you are. Less likely to live,
into the wild go the captive- born.

This final section, though clarifying, also undermines the preceding effects of discomfort and dissonance. It attempts to order a political problem that may require, in Frantz Fanon’s oft-quoted words, “complete disorder.” In acceding to dominant modes of literary representation, Sealey loses the chaotic spacing and the language-forward peculiarity of her formatting: capitalization in the middle of a word (e.g., “sTalking,” rendering the talking in stalking) and the randomly bolded and italicized words. By organizing the physical shape of the poem—the broken lines, the negative space—Sealey denies readers access to something she delicately taught one to navigate: the endless interruption of the state’s perspective.

From the beginning, readers get a feel for the poet’s counternarrative, her writing against the scripts of the nation-state. But the oppositional encounter is not at the heart of Sealey’s intervention. Swerving between narrative and counternarrative, the final poem makes grand pronouncements that challenge universal humanity and official historiography by clouding the text with lofty, abstract nouns, calling to mind history, nature, temporality, naming, consequence, teleology, and silence.

Sealey makes her bold provocations resonate for readers required to do interpretive work, such as asking oneself what it means to reread The Ferguson Report now. After all, this August marks nine years since Michael Brown died. In the interim, George Floyd was killed, Breonna Taylor was killed, Tyre Nichols was killed—the list goes on. The perpetuation of the same violence spreads like fungus, both in the frontline institutions of American democracy and in white supremacist vigilantes. Sealey describes

a kind of headlight
echoing, increasing
in reach. The forecast red,
the city red, diminishing
to the proportion of…

At the end of the DOJ’s Ferguson Report, there are a number of policy recommendations for reforming the Ferguson Police Department and court system in the name of “true community policing.” Have the report’s recommendations been implemented or ignored? Does it matter? For Sealey’s purposes, the policy recommendations are just more grist for poetic transformation. She excavates “a few bad apples” from source text that reads, in part, “Many of those individuals had warrants. … In the wake of several news accounts … the number of charged offenses … the warrant applies.” To break it down, applies becomes apples. Sealey succeeds in demonstrating how just one character away was the police’s own excuse, the bad-apple theory, a narrative of inculpability.

In a critique of policing in the US, the rare event of accountability or justice, as voiced by a legitimating regulatory institution of the state, whether it be the DOJ, the president, or police departments’ own internal affairs lackeys, is often assumed to be an unexamined good. But the political goals of the people and the goals of its so-called representatives are not aligned, just as Sealey’s and the DOJ’s Ferguson Report might share similarities but are not equivalents.

Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is literature that crosses between texts and contexts. “Trying to scrape up,” it circles and recircuits the original, enabling readers to reconstruct violence, narrate brutality while constellating its easy circulation, complicate the question of erasure, and dislodge the trope of white space.

After reading Sealey’s staggering book many times and in many different ways (The Ferguson Report invites such multiplicity), a few lines gloriously obtrude:

A woman stretches
the truth to disappear it, throws
her voice to animate it. As when,
I imagine, the word was made
flesh.

Here is a theory for reading and for writing—for literature itself: the elasticity of the truth, the ethical imperative to both erase and instigate truth, the strain involved in speaking and writing. This woman, though identified with the indefinite article, could be the author herself. Or she could be you.