When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again

The title of A. Van Jordan’s When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again is a quotation, but whose words are they? William Shakespeare, who wrote them into his late play The Tempest? Caliban, the racialized character who speaks them, degraded by Europeans as a “monster” and “devil”? Or do they belong to a centuries-old Black voice that defies the canon from within, painfully waking into its constraining stereotypes? Jordan isolates another line of Caliban’s as an epigraph: “For I am all the subjects that you have.” Are Black people “subjects” of—or merely subject to—an imbalanced society that calls itself free? For white authors from Shakespeare to today, are they not people, simply literary “subjects,” things to write about?

These questions animate Jordan’s fifth book, which speaks to imperiled Black lives through Shakespeare’s Black characters. To do justice to Black people murdered by police—their human-sized losses, the tragic grandeur they assumed on global stages—Jordan reinhabits characters like Othello and Caliban’s mother Sycorax, who becomes a Black woman “hobbled by single motherhood and the gossip that follows.” Caliban himself merges with Tamir Rice, a boy dreaming beyond his circumstances:

Once a boy dreams, there’s no limit
           to where he might soar off, above
pointing fingers and straining voices

trying to name his species.

Like W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror and Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Jordan’s book does not imitate Shakespeare’s style so much as conduct formal and social experiments with his works. Three ingenious character studies take the form of tables: “A Window into Prospero,” for example, crosses columns labeled “Known to Prospero” and “Not Known to Prospero” with rows labeled “Known to Others” and “Not Known to Others,” presenting four perspectives at once.

Amid all the tragedy, the book’s comic core, “Such Sweet Thunder,” takes inspiration from the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé and a Sixties youth culture choreographed to James Brown and vibrantly dressed for the future. “You’ve come to me and asked for a dream,” Jordan writes in the persona of “The Tailor”: “Well, lucky for you, style // is my business.”