This week’s poem is from Incendiary Art, Patricia Smith’s collection of searing elegies for black lives destroyed. The title of the book – a 2018 Pulitzer prize finalist – is repeated in several poems that form a sequence, split and scattered across the text. Each poem-title follows the words, Incendiary Art, followed with a place-name denoting a racist atrocity.
Smith, who was born in Chicago in 1955, has commented that her title reflects the burning-down of the district where she grew up. “Incendiary” has a forceful metaphorical dimension, too: something that has the capacity to fire swift anger, and perhaps revolt. In Smith’s poetry, we can feel the heat of imagination fused with technical control; the artist’s “rage for order” combined with the elegist’s grief, and the activist’s rage for justice.
This week’s poem is a reaction to the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His body was left for more than four hours, and a grand jury decided that his killer, police officer Darren Wilson, would not face charges.
Each new phase of Smith’s oration, crying out that “they” should have left Brown’s body in the street for even longer, summons us to bear witness and responsibility, through a scathingly sarcastic amplification of the secondary insult, the negligence towards the body. But, like other poems in the collection, those remembering Emmett Till, for example, this one is an act of disinterment. Smith insists that the body is seen, so that the crime is seen.
A combination of figures in the first stanza sees the corpse as both seed and sacred symbol, fertilised by being literally “shat upon”. The image of “the lengthy street of browning/ blood” as a walkway, used by people with various motivations, suggests “that new kinda worship” may be another cover-up. The colloquialism “kinda” seems to signal something false or slipshod, backsliding into idolatry, perhaps.
The second stanza moves to a grimmer level of realism: the body is left to rot, and become part of a roadscape. For the young “shriekers on the school bus”, horror is spiced with obsessed fascination. The metaphor of the first stanza is reprised, newly tainted, in “blossoming funk”.
Violence flares in the next stanza, in an almost surreal passage of clashing images, like a section from Picasso’s Guernica. But a quieter shockwave emanates from the three, lower-case words of the fourth stanza’s spare opening lines: “black lives/ matter…” Black Lives Matter, seminal in the Ferguson protests, was founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in response to the 2012 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, and advocates for nonviolent protest against police brutality to African Americans. A season of concentrated protest followed Brown’s death in 2014. Smith amplifies the movement’s statement from the angle of law enforcement: “black lives/matter/most when they are in/ motion…”
The lines jolt, collide and reel back. Never was irony so deadly serious. The verb “matter/matters” is subjected to anaphora spattered alliteratively, while the orator’s outcry rises to its despairing climax. If the “engine that moves us/ toward/ each damnable dawn” represents BLM’s drive for justice and change, it reaches a roadblock in that word beyond-words, “damnable.”
The last two tercets are downbeat. They suggest entropy, a natural mechanism working in every mortal body, and implicit in history. Smith’s writing does more than commemorate the murdered young men and their sorrowful mothers: it resurrects them in a form that resists oxidation – the bright fire of language, able, in Dylan Thomas’s words, to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”. But Smith also helps educate us. White people sometimes misunderstand the meaning of Black Lives Matter. May Smith’s insights help motivate and sustain the drive towards a dawn less damnable.
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK, and TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in the US. The Bloodaxe website also features some powerful recordings of Smith reading from her work.
