Reflections on Head off and Split and Affrilachia

            When digesting Nikky Finney’s wonderful book of poetry entitled Head Off & Split, I thought a lot about Nikki Finney’s relationship to the land and how that has shaped her art. Some of her poems are placed in Alabama, like the poem in which she fictionalizes the inner thoughts of Rosa Parks but also ground it very much so in the reality of the happening.  My Time up with you is partly placed in East Texas. Another poem is featured in D.C. when musing a conversation with Condoleezza Rice. And another poem Cattails, which I loved, was a poem also centered in, what the article by Kathryn Trauth Taylor talks about as: Affrilachian.

            What I truly loved about the connection the article has with the poetry is this attention towards bringing the marganilized to the center. When I think of bringing the marganilized to the center, I think of my time in undergraduate and being assigned the book to read Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks. In hook’s book, she very much so talks about acknowledging those members of the feminist movement who are often marganilized and bringing them to the center; her main focus was to bring black women and women of color voices and experiences to the center of the feminist movement, instead of only prioritizing the Eurocentric center of the feminist movement.

            This is what I think about when I think of bringing the term Affrilachian to the center, from the margins. The Affrilachain people, whom I have always lived adjacent to, are a group of black people and people of color who are not recognized for living in the Appalachia geography of America. The article talks about the conception of the term ‘hill-billies’ and how that term signifies Appalachia and how that completely erases the image of black people who are very much real, very much influential to the area and very much have lived there for generations.

            One poem that seemed to embody this sense of Affrilachia to me was Cattails, the name alone is pretty reminiscent of Affrilachia. The poem speaks of a woman who drove about 5 states wide in order to see another woman whom they had a crush on. Already, there is so much in that. LGBT folk in Affrilachia are a minority, within a minority, seemingly within another minority so one won’t see or hear or know of a lot of gay people in the area so the trips to visit others would be just long. On top of that, there’s this sense of devotion, as though hopes and wishes are being held on to because love is migrational. Near the end, Finney graces us with this lovely line “…she is reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like” I also found this line very body centered.

            I liked the form that Finney used to give us her poetry, some are in block narratives, like Cattail and others are in couplets, like Segregation, Forever. I found her use of space intriguing as she spun the narrative structure of her poems.