In My Defense, Monsters: Notes on Black Poetic Grotesqueries, Composite Humanity, and Freedoms of the Horrific, Part 1

My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.
—Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”

Elizabeth Acevedo opens her chapbook Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths (2016) with “La Ciguapa,” a catalogue of cultural origins of the mythic, blue-black, siren-like figure said to seduce and vanish men who walk along the mountain roads of the Dominican Republic. Each section of the poem relays what “they say” about La Ciguapa, layering a portrait of her that is self-aware of its own contradictions and those inherent to mythologies writ large. La Ciguapa was “stitched / and bewitched from moans and crashing waves”; she was also self-made: “pried apart her jaw / and spit herself out.” La Ciguapa’s varied physicality coagulates as each retold story contributes its logic to her inverted feet, her oceanic skin, the “hoof between her thighs.” In the final section, when Acevedo’s speaker fully enters, it is to undo not only the work of these origin stories but to undo the work of the poem that passed them on: “They say. Tuh, I’m lying. No one says.” The I enacts invasion and erasure in a kind of colonial drag. There was a magic here—a shapeshifter of too many nativities to suffer taxonomy; a creature as much earth as she is woman; a dark feminine spirit detainable only with the aid of five-toed dogs—but “who tells her story anymore? Not her people,” the poem concludes, “who have forgotten all our sacred monsters.”

*

I wrote a book that grieved heavily, and I finished that book. Toward the end of that finishing and beyond it, what poems arrived to me emerged steadily from the well of melancholy in which those ills of rigid gender constructions, systematized racist violence, and toxic narratives of sex and desire had sunk me. They turned—not away from those subjects but from that passive (though convalescent) mode of floating in their whelm, and toward images of action. I wanted to leave behind speakers who succumbed to paranoia, emaciation, and sleep. More and more, there arose in me speakers who would self-emancipate, lurk and leap, bite and fight, and consume ravenously. While the urgency I felt throughout the completion of that book and the arrival of these newer poems was of my own mortality, I found myself still alive, tired of being tired, and of saying that I was tired, and of the more injurious risk of confessing in the presence of my oppressor that I was exactly what he/they/it wanted me to be. I resolved that, at least, my extermination would not be without dynamism.

The new images were not the terminus of my own evolving ideas. They were rather the scenes of collision, an asterisk like a six-point intersection into which sped the vehicular offerings of more profound and articulate thinkers than I. Of course, I had already been spurred by James Baldwin’s figuring of the “Nigger,” that clung-to boogieman, its perverting and pervasive farce. And, of course, Toni Morrison’s critical treatise Playing in the Dark (1992) had momentously pierced the ever-extent barrier against my better imagination. Here are a few punctuating sentences from two early paragraphs of it, in which Morrison declares her project.

For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted by literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature…This agreement is made about a population that preceded every American writer of renown and was, I have come to believe, one of the most furtively radical impinging forces on the country’s literature…These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature […] are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.

While Baldwin advises that white Americans ask themselves why it was necessary to create the Nigger, Morrison proposes that white Americans have in fact created white American-ness as a precipitate codependent on that coalescence of myths about enslaved Africans and their descendants. I don’t intend to set up these readings as radical revelations of our time—“our time” itself being the contentious phrase.

I’m reminded of poet Dan Beachy-Quick’s 2016 Washington University Hurst Professor lecture “The Monster in Me is the Monster in You,” in which he elaborated on the poetically historicized effect the head of Medusa lent to the Aegis shield. A circuitous reflection of violence formed between the mounted decapitation of the infamously petrifying Gorgon and the gloried man who finally extinguished her terrible gaze; Medusa’s formidability became the shield-bearer’s own, and the shield-bearer’s viciousness became hers. Beachy-Quick offered: “What you run toward violence with is the definition of the world that you can hardly see.” How has a darkly painted savagery served as shield behind which the conqueror consolidates his heroism? Shield into which he throws the force of his own self-disgust?

I invoke the Greco-Roman mythologies quite intentionally in my work. To be clear, I have no interest in discarding (for the sake of aesthetics Black or otherwise) that moral and literary tradition that fundamentally shapes the anti-Black, patriarchal, bestial-othering politics that I find myself up against; I have used it in attempts to make sense of the world around me, which is one reason these myths persist. There is little irony in the recognition that among the iterations of the mythic Negro savage are the bloodthirsty cannibal, the insatiable rapist, the deceiving thief, the wanton freeloader, and the corrupting witch. They see in me the things that they would do to them if they were me; they do to me what they would do to them were I not here. Who hunted, dismembered, harvested organs from, pickled appendages and made trophies of, and otherwise consumed the bodies of Black people? Who raped and—for their livestock profit, for their sport—forced Black people to rape each other? Whose museums and private collections and heirloom cabinets are full of, sustained by, enriched by the stolen goods, spiritual objects, artworks and technologies of named, misnamed, and unnamed peoples of the African diaspora? Who constructed their identity of the independent, self-made patriot on the actual torn backs of Black people while also legislating that Black people could not, in fact, be people with any rights against abuse for commercial gain, thus allowing bootstrap individualism to adhere alongside slavocracy? Who introduced narcotics by-the-tons into Black communities, murdered and compromised their leaderships, gutted their grassroots autonomies, declared war on the ensuing nebula of drug-crime and displacement, capitalized on the incarceration of both their pasts and their futures, and gaslit them amid their realities?

Their heroic conquests over the monstrous and inhuman—or, at least, that which was not “man”—makes legendary founder-kings of such as Perseus, Theseus, and Heracles. Aeneas is spared the divine hand of destruction and post-war slavery and later held up by Virgil as the father of Rome. So these tropes of privilege above general misfortune and rewarded triumph over the savage are to be found in European ravaging, colonizing, and enslaving of, namely, the Americas and Africa. They function as a continual identifying underpinning of the United States’s imperial ambitions. It isn’t simply that the false-binary plot of civility versus savagery, or man vs. wild, is most cemented at the borders of said empire, but also that those populations whose humanity is upheld by dominant narratives may commit the most monstrous and inhumane acts through the willful and convenient imposing of the binary plot. This requires the constant reproduction and intervention of particular language and images, and structures the basic, penetrative mythologies of whiteness and patriarchy. Consider the intentional diction in this White House press release from May 2018 regarding MS-13, in conjunction with ex-Attorney General Sessions’s vowing that same month to prosecute as many cases of “illegal immigration” “as humanly possible,” and just a month before Ambassador Haley announced the United States’s voluntary exit from the UN Human Rights Council, ahead of the more visible acts of family separation, internment, deprivation, and death at the U.S. southern border within the last year.

The problems of who gets to be human and who bears the markers of human civility as eliding alibis for their atrocious desires give way to the question of the pursuit itself: What do we want with humanity? This sensibility that is also a legal category that can be conferred, denied, erased, and used to exonerate inhumane devastation and anthropogenic ecocide (what poet Cameron Awkward-Rich recently refined for me as a lack of respect for “the agency of things”)—who is it for? Further, what fetters might a human speaker impose upon the expressive and imaginative capacities of us poets whose human classifications in this empire are tenuous, at best?

About that collision: I should acknowledge that I’m here, in long form, responding to a belief held by at least some of my contemporaries that one of the major merits of poetry is its ability to humanize speakers and, by extension, poets. As one of my fellows at a residency last year declared this position to an auditorium of nodding poetry students, I bristled. Why should a panel of young poets of color—or poets of color in any configuration—find as the most basic public value for our creations a criterion as reactionary and impossible as this? Maybe it’s just personal, but here’s my problem: I have decided that poetry will be the defensible frontier of my own exercises in liberation, and I wish to yield no part of that purlieu to consolidating some model humanity of which my oppressor will regardless remain “diabolically unconvinced,” in the words of Phillip B. Williams. Why would I dare invite those governances to impose upon on my psyche?

My questions follow those that Dawn Lundy Martin asks briefly and rhetorically in a 2015 interview on LitHub.com, in response to the temporalizing, singularity-coaxing of terms that confront her in academia.

I always want to say, whose experimentalism? Whose avant-garde? Who has the right to define these terms and for whom? Sometimes I teach a graduate course titled “Black Radical Poetry,” which charts a course from, and relation between, black modernism and black contemporary experimental poetry. A colleague once looked at my syllabus and said, are some of these “modernists” a little too late to be modern? According to whom, I asked, who determines those parameters for a people who wrote themselves into the category of “human”? In fact, whose humanity? Whose humanism?

Reading this, I’m struck by the agency and action of “wrote themselves into.” Where human is deployed as a categorical misnomer used to corral unbalanced martyrdom, exceptionalism, appeals to respectability, excessive validation of egotism, and a trail of incorrect synonyms for whiteness such as “superior” and “suited,” can it likewise be written out of? Is it a canonical form that can and should be queered, revised, broken? What has come of my picket-signing my manhood or my compulsive pulling at the strings of la-pieta sympathies each time the state reminds me what my people—rather, the people of whom I am one—represent in its mythologies?

*

I wonder, fantastically, after the possibility of being uncategorical, while still thinking in close proximity to Megan Fernandes’s “Vulnerability, Toxicity, and Intimacy,” an essay and interview with poet CM Burroughs. Anchored by the themes of illness, violence, and animal anatomy in Burroughs’s debut poetry collection The Vital System (2012) and by discourses in queer precarity, biopolitics, and disability, the two launch an exchange toward expanding, or resituating, the concept of a “human life” as one characterized by vulnerability to the other, frequented by helplessness, and compromised in its apparent autonomy by intimacies desired and not.

I hinge especially on Fernandes’s considering Burroughs’s treatment of “the mangled, ever-forming body as a site of…representational limitations” as I think of the contestable seen-ness of my cousins S and T. Even to discuss them here, among this bubbling jargon, invites a sort of solvency—abstracts them. S is incarcerated and largely made present to his young son by ever more constricted phone calls. I know only from a years-old photo that his weight fluctuates; I look in the face of his child to remember his own. T is a Type-1 diabetic who undergoes regular dialysis treatments and, in the last year, has had one leg amputated below the knee and lost two toes. In her daily life, she primarily cares for S’s son.

S and T are two people whose vitalities are constantly moderated by machine interactions as well as intervened by the “transplant” or “stranger” (to borrow Burroughs’s diction from her poem “Knitting Bone”). The nation-state’s narrative determination of “human”—the whole, able-bodied, unassisted, mobile, exonerable, white-proximal, democratic- and capitalist-futured citizen—leaves them overwhelmingly illegible. Their lived states are a riddling catalog of entrances and exits, invasion and isolation, excessively penetrated, comprising not only the regular input and output of surveillance and monitoring machines and the intimacies of such transplants as guards, arbitrators, inmates, doctors, surgeons, nurses, and techs, but also the synthetic appendages of gates, cell doors, windows, cuffs and braces, wheelchairs, syringes, medications, etc. These appendages—the metaphorical and actual prosthetic limbs—blur and extend and overall problematize the boundaries of their humanities in manners commonly unaccounted for—and frequently excluded—in images and texts emerging from the civilization that has grown to implicitly require and explicitly produce these lived states. When we were younger, we had always known and/or were kin to a diabetic amputee and a convicted person.

I want to un-obscure here the familiar ubiquity of a composite humanity, a “cyborgian” constant—for how have we synthesized and capitalized on technologies in medicine, prosthesis, surveillance, incarceration, etc. without the experiment that is the Black person in the New World?—that, for some, is more or less the fringe, and is, for the most vulnerable, the fabric of sensuous life.

Jericho Brown’s poem “Homeland” (The New Testament, 2014) engages this kind of composition.

I knew I had jet lag because no one would make love to me.
All the men thought me a vampire. All the women were

Women. In America that year, black people kept dreaming
That the president got shot. Then the president got shot

Breaking into the White House. He claimed to have lost
His keys. What’s the proper name for a man caught stealing

Into his own home? I asked a few passengers. They replied,
Jigger. After that, I took the red-eye. I took to a sigh deep

As the end of a day in the dark fields below us. Some slept,
But nobody named Security ever believes me. Confiscated—

My Atripla. My Celexa. My Cortisone. My Klonopin. My
Flexeril. My Zyrtec. My Nasarel. My Percocet. My Ambien.

Nobody in this nation feels safe, and I’m still a reason why.
Every day, something gets thrown away on account of long

History or hair or fingernails or, yes, of course, my fangs.

The speaker of “Homeland” is transient, between destinations as much as static morphology. The queer between-ness invoked in the image of the vampire—hyper-sexualized, shape-shifting, undead—introduces a theme of grotesque incongruence (particularly in encounters with the nation-state and its devotees) which runs the length of the poem and is iterated next in the specter of Barack Obama, a figure of representative conundrum: “What’s the proper name for a man caught stealing / Into his own home? I asked a few passengers. They replied, / Jigger.”

The “jigger” exchange acts as a tuning rod for absurdity in the later description of the speaker’s passage through transportation security, who confiscate the following: “My Atripla. My Celexa. My Cortisone. My Klonopin. My / Flexeril. My Zyrtec. My Nasarel. My Percocet. My Ambien.” Through this catalog of medicines, Brown constructs the image of a speaker whose presence, mobility, and overall physical life are moderated by at least nine different mass-manufactured drugs, including treatments for HIV, depression, chronic pain, anxiety, allergies, asthma, and insomnia—a detail both absurd and mundane when considered in the context of Black, queer precarity. Brown positions this relatively typical experience of TSA-filtering frustration at the height of his complicating the speaker’s legible humanity, which is almost mechanically constituted by significant chemical input intended to address multiple, chronic “vulnerabilities to premature death,” to borrow from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and which is embossed from the state’s overcompensating follies against its own death.

When Burroughs regards her poems’ intermingling of scientific and intimate lexicons, she speaks of innateness, of the moment of her premature birth. “[T]he hybridity is natural because both body and machine were involved in my making.” In any moment, how close to abnormality, deviant form, threat, and estrangement is a Black life? How composed by cobbled histories, myths, containers, and languages? t’ai freedom ford, in “everything out our mouth magic,” (& More Black, 2019) writes, “the too much /what we spoke broken we be makeshift.” We be frankensteined. How monstrous is a Black tongue? Here is Burroughs’s poem, “Raving: I.”

Once I wrote a poem larger than any man, even Jesus.
So tall the furrow of hair couldn’t be tousled,
feet large as lakes. I titled it Personification so it
would live, Godzilla in parenthesis so it would kill.

There was blood. Testicles lay in the streets
like confetti post-parade. I was glad: Diana
after Actaeon’s own salivating pack consumed him—
limb by limb licked, tendons trailing.

I rode the shoulder of my poem, wanting to see
their faces, none specific, all malevolent, calling out
last moments in ridiculous language—love, affection,
tender, one screamed. Not loudly enough and too late.

I wore red paint, salvaging neither plated breast,
nor firm mouth. Not once was I tender.
I wanted them wasted—him, him, him, him, him

Blood. The disembodied testicles, limbs, tendons, breast, and mouth. Horror and carnage are requisite for the speaker’s release. The dismemberment of men—and their condescending demands for softness, for vulnerability—at the hands / teeth / lake-large feet of the poem she rides, parading, is her triumph. The poem is proxy for her desire to lay waste: a sword, an appendage.

Burroughs’s “raving” makes concise use of its seemingly anachronistic cast who, in their respective myths, trouble the limits of humanity. Even Jesus, the resurrected, is contentiously inhuman. The hunter Actaeon, as told by Ovid in Metamorphoses, spied the hunter god Diana bathing nude in a spring and was, for his transgression, transformed into a deer to be chased and devoured by his hounds. The monster Godzilla is periodically reimagined in modern popular film as more enormous and formidable than ever before, in accordance with audiences’ expanding appetites for awe and collateral destruction, which the monster is fluidly repurposed to mete out (in alignment with the shifting contemporary national anxieties of Japan or the United States). Godzilla’s gender-neutrality, malleable loyalty, and firm promise of tremendous assault provide an appropriate vehicle in and of the poem on which to seat the speaker’s retaliatory desire, cannibalizing the male-supremacist fantasies of legacy power, audibility, and access.

And, as though to curtail any question about the sustainability of such rage and brute power, “Raving: I” does not end, per se; exceeding the shape of the canonical sonnet suggested by its first three quatrains, it lunges into its fifteenth line and its lasting ellipsis of targets: five of him, all stressed. “Once I wrote,” this speaker began, as though retelling an anecdote or legend, as though conferring advice, as though delivering an empirical warning.  

____

“La Ciguapa” from Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths, copyright 2016 by Elizabeth Acevedo, used by permission of YesYes Books, yesyesbooks.com.

“Homeland” from The New Testament, copyright 2014 by Jericho Brown, used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

“Raving: I” is from The Vital System, published by Tupelo Press. Copyright © 2012 by CM Burroughs. www.tupelopress.org.

Lines from “everything out our mouth magic” from & more black, copyright 2019 by t’ai freedom ford, reprinted by permission of Augury Books, augurybooks.com.