Rowan Ricardo Phillips - When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness

What happens when blackness rhymes with blackness? In other words, what happens to our sense of the poetic experience when we read an African-American poem?

How do we know an African-American poem is an African-American poem when we read one? Of course, we dont. We fashion our desire to think of African-American poetry as African-American poetry, and in some sense that proves to be sufficient. Yet what we recognize when we think we recognize an African-American poem is either the race of the author (I know this poet is black), the context of the poem (I am reading this poem in an anthology of African-American poetry), or some form of self-referential content (Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!). There is no such thing a priori as an African-American poem. And not only is there nothing wrong with that, but acknowledging this would make our considerations of African-American poetry stronger for it.

This collection of essays is concerned first and foremost with understanding the moods by which what we call African-American poetry works within and without towards and against an allegorical sense of itself: Phillis Wheatley as an allegory and epigraph to the larger, prosaic impetus of the African-American literary tradition; Frederick Douglasss poetic dilemma and its impact on his prose; the blues and jazz as antagonists to the poet instead of a platform from which the poet gives voice to the musician; Derek Walcotts use of meter and landscape as the unexpected counterpoint to the overdetermined phenomenological experience of Caribbeanness; and, finally, a verse essay in ten-word terza rima (the word, as it is the basic unit of an essay, replacing the syllable as the basic unit of the essay in verse) on Robert Haydens use of the ballad. The objective of these essays is to re-situate a number of poetic conversations I have found overburdened by an allegorical sense of what happens or should happen when blackness rhymes with blackness.

Take Robert Haydens Ballad of Nat Turner, the note upon which this book ends. The ballad is written in the voice of Nat Turner instead of that of an anonymous narrator, which is the traditional tendency of the genre of the ballad. Moved to describe the decisive moment of his life that led to this poem, Turner says that

The spirits vanished. Afraid and lonely

I wandered on in blackness.

Speak to me now or let me die.

Die, whispered the blackness.

Does blackness rhyme with blackness here? Are they two separate words, or a mere repetition of the same phenomena? They are different. One blackness is spatial, it is wandered through; the other is a speaking subject. Its speech act is paradoxical: a didactic whisper. Turner, here as the poet, has asked blackness to bestow onto him one out of two options: to speak to him or to let him die. But what blackness does is speak to him and tell him to die. Blackness changes the speakers or to and and offers itself as both prized equality and terrifying annihilation. In other words, blackness speaks (which is Turners wish, after all) but in speaking disregards the contingent nature of the speakers speech act and wish. As a conjunction, or is the sign of alternatives, substitutes, and opinions of supposedly equal importance. Yet without further elaboration, or also simultaneously offers exclusion (speak or let me die, but not both ) and possibility (speak or let me die, possibly both ); outside of the speech act, we are left to choose one, or to decide not to decide. The English language is such that when we form a sentence as merely b or c (speak to me now or let me die), and that is all we know, we then have no privileged knowledge of whether or intends to be inclusive or exclusive. The moment has an embedded, problematic quality to it in regards to the manner in which allegorical utterance of blackness destabilizes the voice formed by poems. And within this moment, this benign turned on a benign word, The Ballad of Nat Turner reveals an archetypal conflict within the greater narrative archetypal conflictnamely the role of blackness in determining both seen and unseen outcomes of poetic encounter with the imagination and its ineffable counterpart, ineffable blackness itself.

A proposition and poignantly ironic character within the poem writ large, the value of what blackness then can say exists independent of the poet who conceives of the statement as an exclusive disjunction of two propositions, for blackness responds with an inclusive disjunction. Blackness enters our poems as an other, speaking, making with our language something to be better understood. And whether it is to be understood as something new or as simply the same old voice, whether it is the sounds of a new rhyme or just mere repetition is in the balance for us to decide. This is what happens, and is the challenge to us, when blackness rhymes with blackness.

She was a shadow as thin in memory
As an autumn ancient underneath the snow,
Which one recalls at a concert or in a caf.

Phillis Wheatley would be African-American literatures first idea, but she is its epigraph. Although Lucy Terry, Francis Williams, and Jupiter Hammon all preceded her, an insistent clamor of firstness has accompanied Phillis Wheatley with nearly every evocation of her name. Born somewhere in West Africa, sometime around 1753slavery has blotted out the specificsshe was brought to America in a metaphor: stowed in the hold of a slaver named Phillis , her Christian name presaging her in its dark wet wood. Purchased on the 11th of June 1761 in Boston by the Wheatley family, she settled in (if thats the word for it) as a domestic servant in the house on the corner of what are now State and Kilby streets.

By all accounts, she was a precocious child. John Wheatley, in a letter that would form part of the preface of her book of poems, wrote that in sixteen months she attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings. She swept through English and moved on to Latin, by twelve she was writing poetryher own curiosity led her to it, John Wheatley confessed.

Her first published poem, an elegy for a clergyman, appeared in The Newport Mercury in December 1767. And throughout her life her poetry would be steered primarily toward happenings: she composed public addresses, elegies, panegyrics, hymns. She possessed a near perfect pitch when it came to pitting poem to circumstance; she wrote about the right people and with the right tonedignitaries, the famous dead, grand public figures, and sympathy-inducing grieverssoon she was in vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. Poems in London papers popped up. In France, she was on the tips of the lips of the literati. She began to collect her poems into a book. She was barely twenty.