Sarah Gord Blog 4

One thread I found striking this week was the relationship between language and race. This is especially apparent in “Left” where Nikki Finney describes the inadequate support services provided to people after Hurricane Katrina, intimating that the delayed response was largely connected to the fact that most of the people who lived in New Orleans were black. She spends a significant amount of the poem presenting the sign the woman (who is “dark but not broken”) wrote, where she misspelled the word, “please.”

In a direct address to the reader, the speaker of the poem asks:

do you know simply

by looking at her

that it has been left off

because she can’t spell

(and therefore is not worth saving)

or was it because the water was rising so fast

there wasn’t time?

Finney sarcastically suggests that because the woman with the sign did not spell the word “please” correctly, she may not even be worthy of saving at all. Using the phrase, “simply by looking at her,” she connects race with misplaced assumptions of inadequacy or unintelligence – and a devaluing of dialects of English that don’t fall into a so-called “standard” dialect. 

Later in the poem, she writes, “Regulations require an e be at the end / of any Pleas e before any national response / can be taken,” highlighting how ridiculously delayed and inadequate the government’s response was, as well as the ways that people use language as a code to talk about people of color.

As the poem progresses, however, the coded language starts to disappear, and the reasons for not saving people become more explicitly tied to race. The speaker refers to the dehumanization of black people, “historically afraid of water and routinely / fed to crocodiles,” and the U.S. lawmakers, who “wondered by committee what to do,” contrasting the dire situation with the calculated slowness of a committee. She effectively strips the humanity/empathy from the committee (who are acting in a supposedly “objective” but clearly detrimental manner).

Throughout the poem, Finney also uses the “eenie menee mainee mo” rhyme to a chilling effect. Although this game is supposed to be arbitrary and objective, too often kids who use the rhyme to make decisions have a sense of what they’re going to pick before they recite it. The arbitrariness (or not) of choosing who to save based on that game (and the implications of choosing “the very best one”) highlight both the calculated nature of the government and the façade of neutrality.

In “The Identity Repairman,” Thomas Sayer Ellis plays with language and race in a slightly different way. In the poem, he captures years of American history and language around describing black people, transitioning from “African” and ending with “African American.” For each word, he includes only four short lines that sum up the connection between the word, its historical period, and the devaluation of black people in the U.S. The first stanza, “AFRICAN,” is strong and inherently connected to the earth. There is a clarity to the “I am,” and a connection to place itself (“Ask the land”). Under SLAVE, he writes, “America is where / I became an animal,” presenting the dehumanization and disconnection of slavery. Under NEGRO, he is “trapped” in both “segregation” and “integration,” highlighting the challenges of joining a society built on his assumed inferiority. The poem comes nearly full circle with the final term “AFRICAN AMERICAN,” where he highlights the combination of “AFRICAN” with what it means to be American. The final two lines, “Just looking / at history hurts” highlight the inescapable pain of looking back on a history that has devalued him.

In “New Rules of the Road,” Reginald Harris also plays around with the language of interacting with police, presenting the “new rules” for black people. The first two lines of each stanza are relatively neutral, though they do assume the need to be prepared to interact with policemen: things like “Make / No sudden movements,” “Have proper ID on you at / All times,” “Give the officer / Only the materials requested,” and so on. But the third and fourth lines of each stanza shift from coded language to explicit language of not belonging. This is especially apparent in the final five stanzas, where the final lines are “Nothing,” “Nothing,” “Thing,” “No rights,” “You are the profile.” The speaker bleakly presents the dehumanization of black men and takes the “neutral” language and uncovers the dangerous and often life-threatening assumptions behind it.