Gravity Then

How does the presentation of the body meet the narrative and complicate the political?

This week’s readings are short, yet still took an hour to read.  Because they land with an impact resembling being struck, and they tingle in the temporal senses threatening to turn some thoughts purple and bruised.  Some of these poets hurt to read.  Angel Nafis is haunting me with the thought that a twin sister has not made it because those “twin bodies forked path” leave me wondering what happened that her sister could end up with a tattoo on her ass when there’s so much in that girl that a freckle on her nose could teach a class.

Her sister’s got freedom to choose and in so doing forked down her own path; became her own “mass” and faith to believe in.  There is the political ideology that we are accountable to our own lives for the choices we make of ourselves.  I wonder after her sister and the choices she was able to make with her body, a body whose “worth” could go “unmeasured/though neither of us can pass sister.”  What kind of passing does she mean?  Passing has come to connote inclusion in the mainstream of whatever culture one is a member of or attempts to insert into.  Whatever the environment, neither Nafis nor her sister can pass in it.

In Gravity, the last of her poems included, she names a litany of external descriptors assigned to her: how ethnic she looks, her hair, her gums, her smell.  The first section is the straw that will lead us to her threshold in the second section of the camel’s back.  What she does in the second section is not break.  She instead doesn’t even respond to the assignations but owns her color, “moonless charcoal,” claims her skin makes a “Midas-touch the buildings I walk by.”  Gets high off her own scent: “I’m blunted off my own stank.”  She makes it clear that the revolutionary act of loving her self, her existence is the deepest political statement she can breathe action into daily.

 Lawrence Joseph’s poem Then made me swoon a little.  Okay, anything Detroit gets me in the chambers I admit.  It’s the way he presents what passes through “Joseph Joseph’s” body as he abandons his business while fires rage and looting is imminent.  The business of Joseph’s Food Market is about to be lost, and a vision of the proprietor, the father too old with “bad legs” and a shaking arm picking up an onion makes the narrator cry.  That howl will be the companion to the narrator for nine years before he admits how deeply the loss of that business – what his father managed to manifest – defined the narrator’s inner voice of sorrow and point of view.  Loss.  Loss through justified rioting; loss of personal/familial pride; the conflict of being in the middle of a moment so impersonal and yet so directly impacting.  What else can he do but howl?