I found myself really connecting to Morgan Parker’s work. I was drawn most to the parallels. There are just so many- between Parker and Beyonce, between Lady Gaga and Beyonce, and between Parker and the world around her. It’s enjoyable, it creates a consciousness that can be interacted with. The book feels like a process. Processing one’s own body and thoughts as they connect to the social and personal norms imposed on us. I felt more like an observer than a reader of this work.
There’s me, there’s you, there’s us, there’s we. There’s a community here. A univeraility for black girls, in a way- because who wouldn’t want to have a body like Beyonce? The questions she muses on in The President’s Wife are ones of a social identity. The social order that we’re placed under prevents us from our fullness. This seems like Parker's attempt at complicating that. Or at least create a conversation with it.
I appreciate Parker’s vulgarity. In The Book of Negroes, “This book is spit, cum, cloud cover. We Definite people.” this description of the body in this way, the mass of bodies that created this book, this consciousness- it is vulgar. It’s messy. This book is fluid. Made of fluids, like the body. Format wise, there is a lot happening with spacing. It gives a very deliberate pause to the poem that cannot be felt in the parts of the poems that don’t have the extra space. To leave the spaces where they are, after raw descriptions of self, it forces the observer's perspective.
Equating womanhood to Beyonce is probably one of the most powerful moves Parker does in this work. Throughout the work she explores her own sense of womanhood, saying “I will never be woman enough” in the same book as she finds the humanity in Beyonce and herself, “I am very complicated and so is Beyonce”.
Mostly I am enthralled by all of what “Beyonce” represents in this work. She’s the social norm, the bar the expectations of Black women are thrown to, she’s the gospel of black women in a lot of ways. The influence she has over pop culture, and the way black women are expected to behave in society.
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ReplyDeleteI love how you say Parker has created a consciousness through parallels that can be interacted with. She has created a community between Lady Gaga and Beyonce, the reader and Parker, the world and the reader, Parker and Beyonce... I could try to name them all, but it's already much more mathematical than I anticipated.
ReplyDeleteParallels, which serve to connect, can also be a device that creates contrasts and duality. I appreciate that you discuss how Parker explores her sense of womanhood and feels like she's not enough, whilst in the same book, recognizing her complicated humanity. This, to me, is the duality that parallels create by virtue of their existence -- not because anybody tried to set them up, but because association does that on its own. Being a woman is full of comparisons and alignment in the same breath. Beyonce is someone in the public eye, so she is subject to the duality of praise and scrutiny... worship and objectification.
-- also -- I deleted my comment and reposted it because of a typo... yikes