Next on our list of books is The Tradition by Jericho Brown. This poetry collection has some beautiful prose and challenging subject matter.
"Ganymede" says 'a man trades his son for horses. That's the version I prefer,' and I'm confused. Is this a well-known proverb? The idea is still there, that everyone gets what they want, kind of. The boy gets to escape his father and become immortal, the father gets wealth and loneliness. But then he equates God wanting you to rape and I feel I've missed something because I'm not familiar with the proverb. Ah, a Greek myth, I had to look that up. I had not heard this one, but there is the rape and selling the child for horses. Then we shift to a modern analogy of seeing a lie in the guise of a benefactor.
"As a Human Being" makes it clear that a child who has inherited their father's anger, and is feeling flush with victory over him, has just done their father some injury. They know it's the stillness before the storm, this moment in time, but that they have broken the years of fear their father has bound them with. Their father will always see this moment of conquest written on his skin and be afraid, just as they have been afraid. They know they have moved beyond their father's control and are leaving their mother behind in that prison cell of fear and obligation. They see the bonds of love as an obligation and with the loss of it, freedom.
"Flower" is a flash frame of images focus on the color yellow, but it still has images of sorrow contrasted by the color associated with hapiness and sunshine.
"The Microscopes" starts with a beautiful description of a microscope from a student's perspective, encapsulated by the phrase 'the baby canons of war'. You feel the resentment of the student for being forced into focusing on the things that make us the same, as if that encapsulated the true person and negated importance. It reduces the need to be seen and offers instead the truth that we are all basically the same, all one person, unimportant. That sparks the thought that God doesn't see us as individuals, and possibly not at all. Not worth the bother. "I know when I began ignoring slight alarms that move others to charge or retreat." You know the author is talking about fight or flight, but it's like it's masking the obvious meaning in the slightly disturbing tones that make you think of PTSD, but in reality, is the baseline for people of color. It's the feeling of low simmering anger that burns all the time until it burns out the normal responses and becomes the new baseline. Everything is an invasion, a precursor to battle. That feeling is then related to the kind of affront that white people seem to feel when they see a person of color walking with a white person. A beautiful gut punch.
"The Tradition" takes us to space where the protagonists "filmed what we produced as proof we existed before it was too late" as if their lives were like the crops that you could watch on film in double speed, sprouting all too quickly and then cut down.
"Hero" starts with the idea, 'Fighting over our mother's mind' which evokes the feeling of too many children for too little attention or emotion from their mother. Discipline was all she had left to give. If that mother could have chosen abortion, she would have. That only in the speakers adulthood can she spare a modicum of affection for the grandchildren. "Black is a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death." That last line reminds me of Vietnam Vets returning from war to anger. It is a thing of sorrow to think your existence was treated as trial that must be endured. Your mother would have rid herself of you if she could, and the world is surprised you're still alive.
"After Another Country" starts with a feeling of wandering lost, and then at least one breaks through the whiteness.
"The Water Lilies" begins with an outside observer of the flowers commenting on the whiteness, good at appearances, and aspirational beings. Commenting on ideals. The author then equates it to a black person watching a movie about slavering and imagining they would have stood up to their captors. "Their eyes raised to the sun without going blind." It's clear the speaker thinks this ridiculous notion of aspiring to a life without oppression, ignoring history and the realities of life, is as likely as staring at the sun without losing one of your senses.
"Foreday in the Morning" delights me with the line, 'she told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was an American." The speaker doesn't believe in what their mother does, but they love their mother. The speaker describes the futility of putting effort into something beautiful only for it to bloom when you are hard at work elsewhere, so you can't enjoy its beauty. The focus then shifts from this effort to wondering how they could ever be considered lazy. The speaker wishes they could show whoever first said they were lazy, and by extension anyone who repeats it, all the black people going to work hoping that they someday can work hard enough for what they dream of, just a little bit of color. What a modest dream. It ends with a line I can't parse out right now. "My god how we leave things green." As if that little bit of color, to those who spend their lives working toward that desire, will never be realized in the reality of a monotone life.
"The Card Tables" gives a beautiful picture of life, family, and friendship. Gathering and playing around a card table that could become the surface for anything or pushed out of the way.
"Bullet Points" evokes the ire bordering on rage at the excuses and ridiculous scenarios that police press releases try and pass off when a person in their custody dies. The distrust of the police to do or be anything decent, and if the speaker does ever decide to kill themselves, it will be how any other person would, with their vice of choice, and not at the hands of the police. I can't even comprehend the fear and certainty of disrespect that is clear in this poem.
"Duplex" paints a picture of a hard life. Beatings, tears, and the mundane hurts that live in the place you are. It just is. It feels so bleak and inevitable as the poem repeats the line "a poem is a gesture toward home." It makes me wonder what that gesture is, but also brings to mind a person being asked how they got where they are in life, and that person gesturing back at their childhood home as if that summed it all up.
"The Trees" describes three trees in the speaker's yard, crepe myrtles, crying trees. The shade, peace and friendliness of that space being the object of love and affection, almost separate from the reality and substance of them.
"After Avery R. Young" has a poignant line that says "Slavery is a bad idea. The more you look like me, the more we agree." It describes the power of belonging, of being a we, of expecting. It is a roiling, waiting, undying knowledge that connects a people.
"Second Language" describes a black string knotted around a tongue and the double language of words and definitions that mean one thing to the speaker and something else to another.
"A Young Man" explores the perspective of a father gazing at his son, a son he views as superior to him, the one who will inherit the family's protection. The last line says he isn't in jail yet, as if the father had to leave his son in charge too soon, or that the swagger and seriousness that the young man takes in the protection of his family will surely land him in jail eventually. Or at the very least that this thing that the speaker honors as good and right and better about his son, will be punished by the law.
"Part 2 - Duplex" begins with a shocking contrast of rape and a field of paintbrushes. It talks about men wandering shirtless as if appalled that the thing that brings the speaker fear and pain can walk fearlessly, unashamed and uncovered before the world. The speaker wants to obliterate her need for the field of paintbrushes, which makes us assume her need for the field. A field that must mean peace, beauty, and safety. That the field is invaded, and therefore she must stop needing peace, beauty, and safety because there is none. It ends with the line "the opposite of rape is understanding," but understanding what? The reality that you must live in an unsafe world? That not all men? Maybe both.
I'm going to take a break from poetry for a minute as I decide where to head next. I started Beloved by Toni Morrison. It was beautiful prose, but I think I need to be able to concentrate hard, and I wasn't in a position to do so when I started. I got confused until I figured out the house was haunted by an angry baby. The language is so very full of anguish and anger, rightly so, as the main characters aren't long outside the context of slavery. Within the first chapters we know the Annie is a hard eyed, practical woman who has been the object of deprived desire during her time at Sweet Home. The arrival of a former resident after the loss of her husband rekindles that feeling of shared trauma and desire while her only remaining child in the house watches on and is hurt by the one bit of attention she had in her life being taken. I have to take this one in small chunks.
