Ennui, Alcohol and Punctuation in "There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce"

The last line of the final poem in There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé asks: “Why do you get up in the morning”. It is a question without a question mark, a question that hangs heavy with empty space, too exhausted to inflect or upturn itself. It makes me think back to “99 Problems” and how #99 reads “I’m tired.” And how what Beyonce won’t say on a therapist’s couch is “what if I said I’m tired / and they heard wrong / said sing it”

Throughout the poems, there is a constant feeling of malaise and why bother. I think about the first poem, “All They Want is My Pussy My Money My Blood” and how each sentence only occupies one line, the space in-between like a long sigh. The stacking of these lines and the regularity in structure creates an equalizing quality, providing the same weight and importance to “I have a nose ring I forget about” and “There are far too many of me dying” or “I could die any minute of depression.”

Alcohol provides perpetual and slushy texture to this work: “When I drink anything / out of a martini glass / I feel untouched by / professional and sexual / rejection,” “You wash up on a barstool,” “A sip of liquor from a creek,””What to a woman is the bottom of a glass,” “All Men Have Been Created Equally / To Shiver At The Thought Of Me / is something I used to think but forgot / or got drunk tried smoking something new.” Sex is everywhere, too: “I just want to have sex most of the time.”

Both alcohol and sex are depicted as both a need and a distraction, and this is exactly the point. It makes me think about ennui, the various crutches we all depend on to make it through the day. But ennui is typically a product of the elite. As far as I understand it, boredom was basically “invented” by the Victorian aristocracy, because they had delegated all the labor to other people and internalized commodified notions about what is important in the world, creating in them a kind of emotional and spiritual poverty. Who else had the time or the privilege to be bored?  The radical and fascinating thing that I see Parker doing here is inviting the notion of a Black Ennui – how the inescapability of violence and oppression can manifest as a kind of banality, how it can create an exhaustion and despair for black folks that can feel so often like ennui. How you can become bored with death, so much so that it takes on a kind of objectified, frozen beauty: “The most beautiful hearse     / I have ever seen / is parked in front of my stoop / Perched            hands folded for six to eight weeks / twinkling like a siren / a new idea of love,”

I’ll mention, because it keeps running through my head as I write this, the lyrics to Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky,” which I think musically illustrates so much of what I’m trying to express here:

I tried to drink it away
I tried to put one in the air
I tried to dance it away
I tried to change it with my hair

I ran my credit card up
Thought a new dress make it better
I tried to work it away
But that just made me even sadder
I tried to keep myself busy
I ran around circles
Think I made myself dizzy
I slept it away, I sexed it away
I read it away

Beyoncé is the perfect site of exploration for these questions, because she represents the merging of two worlds that have typically been unallowed to meet: Beyoncé is the elite, seemingly untouched by the problems facing the majority of people on this earth, and she is Black. This raises the question - how does a racist culture revere a black goddess? Parker’s poems suggest that Beyoncé has been treated like a vessel – for a robotic nature of femininity, for Lady Gaga. She has been so eroded of any kind of interiority that Parker cannot even imagine that Beyoncé is honest with her own therapist. And even when Beyoncé asks questions, taking on a voice of her own, the result is poignant and brief. Consider, for instance, “Beyoncé Celebrates Black History Month”:

“I have almost

forgotten my roots

are not long

blond. I have almost forgotten

what it means to be at sea.”

This poem is so clever, the line breaks so brilliant. Because even in this admission, Beyoncé is evading. The sentence doesn’t end with, “I have almost forgotten my roots.” or even “I have almost forgotten my roots / are not long,” both of which conjure associations of ancestry and lineage. But in the next line, it is revealed that the roots are simply strands of blonde hair. Of course, the poem holds all the meanings simultaneously, but it is telling that Beyonce cannot talk about her roots without also implicating her hair.  

Throughout these poems, there is a hunger for something different. A utopic day when “your shit will be unbelievably together.” Parker writes: “One day you’ll care a whole lot you’ll always take vitamins / And exercise without bragging and words will fit perfectly / Into your mouth like an olive soaked in gin / The glory of an olive soaked in gin and its smooth smallness” (76). It’s a utopia that still relies on alcohol as medicine and metaphor. It’s a utopia that can perhaps only be tasted in small doses. I think back to the last line of “So What” that asks why you get up in the morning and has no punctuation. I think about how the absence of a question mark holds space, offers room for something else to be created. And then I remember the closing lines from “Poem on Beyonce’s Birthday”: “Today your open eyes are two fresh buds / Anything could be waiting.”