It's late, 3AM, but these poems won't let go of me. I have to write.

The first poet I read was Abani. "Aphasia" evoked a gut-like and jarring reaction because it dealt with language in a usurping yet subtle way. 'Aphasia' means loss of ability to understand or express speech, and his lines, "My language is dying the same way / my father did," is in direct reaction to the colonizer's language. I am reminded of the epigraph in Junot Díaz's "Drown":

The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else.

-- Gustavo Pérez Firmat, “Bilingual Blues”

Abani does something a little different than Firmat. He says, "My language is dying the same way / my father did: / Alone. Night. And there are no storms. Only / moonlight straining through holes in a tin roof / And the slight exhalation, lips / pursed as though to say: Uwa'm."

Uwa'm (according to my Internet research/old Mills's Poets of Color blog) means father, cousin, close relative (in Hausa). Abani says his language died alone, at night, and there were no storms. It died quietly, like "moonlight straining through holes in a tin roof." It died insidiously. This line's imagery and metaphor discreetly aludes to how colonialism destroys a culture through insidious means, like how missionaries came into the Philippines, bringing Spanish and the Word of God to save the "savages," to the US government bringing English to the same land as an enlightening tool (and to also save America's "Little Brown Brothers"), controlling the culture through language. But in a similar discreet technique, Abani switches this control by using the colonizer's tongue (English) and in the next lines, "And slight exhalation, lips / pursed as though to say: Uwa'm." Here, the exhalation (breathing in) and lips belong to the narrator's dying father. His last breath is in his own native tongue.

But enough about Abani. Let's talk about the other poets. The selection of poets here was interesting and I tried to find an aspect that connected them all--and I did, and it was Elmaz's question: "How does history and poetry relate and create each other?"

Welch's and Harper's poems interested me because of their thematic confrontation with the idyllic 'America' found in the Midwest and South. Poetry and history relate to each other because of confrontation. Poetry and history create each other because one, poetry (as art) reflects culture and comments/confronts how the culture came to be, and two, like Welch's and Harper's poems (Harmen, Montana and To Mammy, respectively) directly deal with the past and present in terms of retribution and recompense. I am reminded of Martín Espada's "Imagine the Angels of Bread":

"this is the year

that darkskinned men

lynched a century ago

return to sip coffee quietly

with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners."

Here is how Welch's Indians in "Harlem, Montana," dealt with the raging past:

"When you die, if you die, will you remember
the three young bucks who shot the grocery store up,
locked themselves in and cried for days, we’re rich
help us, oh God, we’re rich."

Here is how Harper's Southern narrator in "To Mammy" dealt with it:

"we would like Mammy Callie on a stamp;

recompense is retribution”

Like Espada's poem, both deal with the recompense of the colonizer's massacre/slavery without the same level of intensity and power as "their executioners." Their retribution isn't the same. Mammy being on a poststamp is not an even level of recompense for having been a slave, a nonhuman, to her masters.

Speaking of the other poets in the selection--Miller's "Before Hip Hop" and its beat and rhythm was fantastic/moving in its simplicity and Moss' experimental poems were EXPERIMENTAL (but my favorite was "p = the Poetry Constant" because of its revisualization of the poem's structure.).

Lastly, I'm leading the discussion on Marisa de los Santos's poems, and I wanted to leave a few thoughts:

- First off, I love how her series of poems all tell a story

- Most of her poems are very symmetrical (even stanzas); what does that reveal/evoke?

- All poems deal with a relationship

- Another stylistic choice of her: lists (what does she do with them? How does she reveal character through them?)

- "Rite of Passage" and "Because I Love You," both use 2nd person. How does this POV affect the storytelling? What does it reveal?

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~ Melissa Sipin