Afro Blue

For our June 2020 playlist, we asked contributor Faylita Hicks, whose poem “Photo of a Girl, 1992: Gremlins” appears in the issue, to curate a selection of music for us. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

This playlist, entitled “Afro Blue,” was created in mid-May 2020, two weeks after the shooting of Breonna Taylor and the release of Ahmaud Arbery’s damning video. I read Poetry’s June 2020 issue with these current events in my mind, the headlines mingling with the refined chaos of poems such as Karisma Price’s “My Phone Autocorrects ‘Nigga’ to ‘Night’” and Rajiv Mohabir’s “Tattvamasi, You Are That.” In this issue, subtle erotic sensuality seems imbued in every poem that says, in one way or another, “I knew I was a god/when you could not/agree on my name,” as Meg Day phrases it in the poem “Portrait of My Gender as [Inaudible].” Reading the issue made me question the true nature of desire and our purported freedom to express ourselves. 

It is now less than two months before the fifth anniversary of Sandra Bland’s death in the rural county jail of Waller, and the state of Texas has officially opened. People are rushing out from the soft comfort of their homes into the sunny streets, celebrating Memorial Day with liquor, top 100 hits, and a detrimental lack of social distancing. They are putting us all at risk and I can’t help but think of the previously incarcerated. For those who have spent time in forced, and occasionally unwarranted, isolation from the rest of the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has become a ritual of déjà vu. I wanted this playlist to be something like that. A reminder that—since before many of us were alive—writers and artists have always been on the frontlines, fighting for the right to free movement for Black and Brown people. Even now, while we are all confined to our soft beds and hot showers and delivery food and Netflix, there are writers, artists, and activists using computers, phones, and cameras to fight for the release of the people who cannot socially distance in their jail cells, prison cells, and detention centers.

This extensive playlist includes some of that rebel music and poetry. It has some underground hip hop, some booty-poppin’ jams, some feel-good tracks, a little rock, a definite amount of sadness, and, of course, love. If listened to in its entirety, it is a story about resistance; a never-ending shout-out to Black femmes, queer love, underpaid touring artists, and former felons; it is an altar that remembers the thousands of Black lives being lost to the apathy of America’s diseased heart and the many lives lost in New York and other major cities throughout the US. It’s a little something I want to share with you. A reminder that even when we are tired, we must continue to fight.