March 14 blog

In “America’s Carnage,” Jason Carney addresses violence by stating and remembering victims of white America’s sick and violent systems.  Using blunt speech, alliteration and vivid imagery to implant a sense of urgency in the reader, Carney reminds us that the system of killing people of color, particularly black people is static and has not changed (although much of white America would love to believe that racism and the killings have ended).  

The poem is so frank, it does not cut corners.  Carney asks, “how many ways we got to kill a man to take his dignity” (52).  Citing the brutal murder of Froggie James, listing the horrific details of his murder, Carney points out the fact that the killing of people of color serves not only as massacre but as a humiliation tactic, a way to remind spectators that the deceased was never viewed as human by white people.  

Carney uses the letter “B” as a labial frothing, spilling out of the mouth as the reader speaks it. “... blistered… bled out bruise” the mouth feels disgusting as those words are spoken (53).  These consonants create a horrific scene, imagistic like the “gurgles of death” (53).  Carney makes the murders, which the reader may thought to have only happened in some past moment, current.  As we read the poem, speak their names, the deceased are with us.  We realize “lynch mobs ain’t dead,” they turned themselves into the justice system and the death penalty (54).  In understanding that change has not really come, merely that horrific people and systems have disguised themselves as just, like a devil that changes it’s costume, we understand these murders Carney writes about to be current embodied experiences and not remnants of the past.  

In the theme of remembrance of the horrors of acts of violence, Tarifa Faizulluh’s “You Ask Why Write about it Again,” speaks of a PTSD of sorts.  Mistaking blades to cut herbs as blades of war.  A child who is deaf and cannot sleep seeing blood on the wall.  These are things that one cannot forget, and why should we ask people to forget them?  

In “Summer, Somewhere” Danez Smith imagines an alternate universe where black young men do not have to live there lives under the constant veil of white society and law enforcement.  “No need for geography/ now that we’re safe everywhere.”  The world is completely redrawn.  This is a beautiful remembrance of Trayvon Martin and every other black young man who did not get to grow up because some white person saw them as a threat when they were simply trying to explore and understand the world- figure themselves out and have fun like every young person should get to.  White society, imperialist societies kill people of color as a tool of hierarchy and supremacy, then as an additional tool of supremacy, asks their family members and loved ones and the world to forget about them.  Writing their stories, being so bold, is a retaliation to violence.