body complex #11

The poem Then by Lawrence Joseph stood out to me and I have so many different ideas swirling in my head about it. The ways in which body is represented throughout is illuminated in the poet's location and voice. The emotional vocal is represented, "breathed slower as if that would stop the pain splitting his heart" (134), the reader immediately aware of the sensation of suffering. The pace also grows longer between stanzas, when read slowly, adds to the sensory vocal creating more time to sit with the sadness that ferments in the mind. This is about loss, and perhaps gain... "the voice howling within you was born then" (135). Fire is an element used repeatedly in this poem that works as the information vocal, aiding in filling the readers mind with observations relating to the location and body of the poet. We see it when he says "turned the ignition key" at the beginning and then more obviously, "fire was eating half of Detroit". Fire can mean creation, destruction, transformation, which I think is a large part of the political context of this poem. I think the deliberate use of "ignition" is so creative because it's a metaphor for thinking critically, turning on your political awareness in a way, but he's also talking about leaving something behind.

The poem is, on the surface, about a massive fire in Detroit destroying his working class father's business, and reflecting on the devastating fact that his father, a first gen Arab American was no longer able bodied and would lose what he created, and you the viewer of this disaster would never know the pain and suffering of this family, only that a fire happened and a building was turned to dust.

The political features of this poem, what we are to critically tap into, are subtle. Although the date of the fire is not provided, my guess is that it may have been about the 1967 race riots that caused much of Detroit to catch fire. I think too what is important about this poem is that Joseph is not black, he is Lebanese and Syrian which I think is political in itself. In a place like Detroit which is heavily segregated and predominantly Black, Joseph's family was facing another type of "othering" because of their ethnicity that doesn't fit in to the Black/White binary of race and social movements in the 1960s and 70s.

I think this poem is a great example of how a poet can give just enough information to allow the mind (of the reader) to come up with their own interpretations while staying relatively close to a deeper meaning. For example, I've mentioned how the body itself is political in it's outward appearance and physical ability and how these aspects of the physical body are politically assigned to class, race, ethnicity. But I also felt the importance of intellect the body is capable of acquiring and I think that challenges or complicates assumptions of class, race, age and physical ability.