Digging Out Our Prayers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7w4TUoJcNg

Hearing Ruth Forman’s slippery voice changes this poem’s positionality for me. Here is a poem that breathes into me its own life, its own rhythmic voice, its own entity. I am swept away by its longing and its change of pace, by its black, Christian motherly voice, by its sweetness and its heartbreak. When I read Forman’s interview by Buchanan in The Writer’s Chronicle, I was locked in by Forman’s words:

“Writing in vernacular represents the voice on the page. You may force a reader to read the poem out loud and that’s not a bad thing. How does it challenge me as a writer? It’s so important to me to let that voice be heard as best as possible…”

This made me think immediately of the other poets in today’s reading section, but mostly I gravitated to Mahealani Perez-Wendt.

“Bury Our Hearts at Walmart, etc.” haunted me. Her repetition created a cascading voice, spatially alluring our tongue to dance and sing, and yet the language, the images, the bones, the moans—they haunt you. I read the poem aloud to myself, to hear the poem’s voice come out, and there’s so much that this voice is telling me, telling us. I think immediately to one of my favorite quotations from James Baldwin, during a brief documentary film “Baldwin’s Nigger”:

"I’m compelled, I’m speaking of myself as a black man, to doubt my history, to examine it; I’m compelled to try to create it. I’m trying to excavate my history from all the rubble that has been buried for so many hundreds of years. And that means I have to question everything." — James Baldwin

What Perez-Wendt is doing in “Bury Our Hearts at Walmart, etc.” is what Baldwin is speaking of—excavating. Via the poem’s voice, she is exploring this meticulous (which is represented by the poem’s beat) excavation, the removing from the earth one’s family history—“The sands of my birth”—and the totality of this method, this movement is a loss of culture (in I.) but also the regaining of it through individualistic means: “I exhume myself, / Dug up my bones, / Threw salt, / Blessed the resurrection. / I anointed myself.” Here, Perez-Wendt is enacting what Baldwin did as well—we are compelled, as children of loss, to re-examine our own histories, to excavate the bones of our past (the histories we carry in our bodies and that have been transmuted to us through “the sands of our birth”). We question everything, we anoint everything, we reclaim it.

It makes me think back to Ruth Forman’s poem, “Prayer Like Shoes,” and her thoughts on her book of the same title. When she reorganized it and made the title poem the book’s honor poem, the book shifted and changed to a book of healing. Each poem and each section became a prayer. Like Perez-Wendt’s poetry, Forman’s became voices that encircled such great loss, yes, but also usurped that loss and made it anew, made it ours, excavated it from the rubble that has been buried for so many years.

I think of Perez-Wendt’s last lines in Double Decker, “We are all agreed / Father would turn over / In his grave / If he could.” That is what our poems do. Though history, through systematic and institutionalized racism, classism, poverty, and every other –ism that seeks to oppress and destroy, our stories, our poems, our narratives—seemingly dead—turn over in our graves and are alive. When we dig them out, exhume our skeletons from the earth, we regain them, heal from them, are one with them.