Black Anguish
I'm not asking you to play Cleopatra and Liberace that act is too bulky and very cynical worldly people might even think you're joking or lift up your armor looking for armor and find it along with some bullet dimples I just love what a mouth does in rain his face after the arraignment his wrists after the shackles so soft so bloated and edemic roadless blue eroding and the baby crawling across the alphabet we made that from the center of the trap we built this life
It's just way more eloquent than anything to let yourself smile about it The market would call your enjoyment meaningless all these captains of industry are thieves! And today we took a walk and laughed erratically at the damp lenient scene, the chemtrails huddled like rainbows, hugging, posing vibrantly for conspiracists rubbing the sky with their swiftness of filth He asked me why isn't that water beneath us moving? And we laughed all over again, heavier, more sorrowful. It's a toxic waste dump all the sludge is rooting it down like anchors and husbands, I explained, and we kept laughing uncontrollably now and the rain sounds steal drums as us forgetting to act stolen
Feature Date
- September 23, 2022
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Phillip B. Williams
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“Black Anguish” from MAAfA: by Harmony Holiday.
Published by Fence Books on April 19, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Harmony Holiday.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Harmony is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa (April 2022). She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at LA’s music and archive venue 2220arts, a space she runs with several friends. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, an NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.
Maafa is an epic poem about reparations and the female body. Maafa undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killed her father and been granted eternal life.
Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero’s journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images she exorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.
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