I did not want to get stuck reading this book. Nikki Finney has The ability to really pause you.
I started reading this book outside. I just left a market of my own to get groceries and I wondered, waiting for my ride, between the parallels of events. The errand-girl-turned-errand-woman seems embodied, imagined as next to me. Or who I possibly could have been, had I been older during the Baby Bush era. Finney puts us in this type of space, while keeping it dream-like in rhythm.
“George Bush doesn’t care about Black People”. A fact sung in middle school’s after we were exposed to a Kanye West. Finney reminds us that Rosa Parks was this kind of bold and a different kind of tired. Now, in our “History vs White Supremacy” climate, we have poems like “Dinner with Strom”, to interrogate racisms dinner party sanctum. She designs Bush's White House and the Crawford Ranch around his ignorance, but the ignorance of the White House goes down to the root. Abraham Lincoln "freed the slaves" and his house was built on their bodies.
“in Kanye-West-Was-Finally-Right formation” (15) we have gathered, it feels. We’re wondering what it really means? Is it possible to look it up? Like #43 “declared” of his smart secretary; are we to realize that we should look up the things we don’t understand before using them?? Is the reality that Black America was never meant to understand? We are supposed to be on the roofs as the water rises? We're supposed to be left off buses, again? We're supposed to gift America the gift of it's literal foundation with slavery in disguise as a thank you note?? And that's it??
My ride came. I’m home now, sitting on the porch, because to read a book that invokes the sun and sky the way this one does would be shameful. This is an outside read. From descriptions of the aerial views over a drowning Katrina to a mapped landscape of the political ecology of blackness. I really appreciate Finney’s ghosts, the ones that live in the experiences and pages of this book. I really, really do.
Kimani,
ReplyDelete"Abraham Lincoln "freed the slaves" and his house was built on their bodies." Ooof. That was painful to read. Much like Finney's work itself. We sit in the pain and realize that we must "pause" there to begin to understand it. I think you bring up a great point about where this book should be read. Where should we read these works? How do we know if a book calls us to read it in the fresh air or under our covers? Some books we must read in community, I would say all the books we've read fall into this category but, this book in particular calls for a communal reading. Thanks for this post.
xoxo,
Rai