What if I said I'm DYING? a reading of Morgan Parker's There Are Things More Beautiful Than Beyoncé

“There’s far too many of me dying.” (1)

It’s on the first page and it hits me like a freight train. This sense of death that is both inside and outside the speaker at once. I mean that to say this moment feels like an embodiment of the point at which the individual and the group become one, where the personal and the political are intertwined. There is an interconnectedness of Black life, Black bodies, and Black communities that has been critiqued and catalogued and analyzed for a while. Yet, in this work I see the soul of the Black American singular, one body that is also enmeshed within a multifaceted Black body/politic/conception that brings with it a number of consequences both joyful and dangerous.

I want to remain on that first poem for a minute because I am attempting to write my manuscript at the moment and as with any piece of work we hope to grasp the reader from the jump. For me “All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood” is the type of opening I hope to create for my readers. It is formatted in such a way that you are not overwhelmed as a reader, there is space between the lines, you can see it breathing. Each line or rather sentence is as the first line says a “condition” each being connected to one another but capable of standing on their own.

Do you ever feel like there are moments when words on a page can feel like they are simultaneously making you feel seen and ripping your spine from your body? Parker writes, “I do whatever I want because I could die any minute. / I don’t mean YOLO I mean they are hunting me.” This is the point at which I feel most seen and most in pain. This idea that I must live the life I choose in spite of the various threats to my existence. More than anything these lines remind me of my mother. A woman who has spent the last two decades as a doctor taking care of those who have fallen ill. She does what she wants, she achieves her goals, and yet she works in an office of Trump supporters, and we still fear those sirens behind us when we’re driving home. They are “hunting” us which means we “do everything right just in case” (4). I have watched my mother perform in certain spaces and I know that in many cases, especially academic settings, I have my own persona of protection (like what Sasha Fierce is to Beyoncé).

One poem I am thinking about in particular in regards to this idea of personas is “What Beyonce Won’t Say on a Shrink’s Couch” (49)

what if I said I’m tired
and they heard wrong
said sing it

These personas or performances we put on lead me to the concept of entertainment that Parker draws upon throughout the text. As I was reading this book I found myself asking a number of questions; what is the job of the woman? the slave? the Black person? Is it to entertain? Is the life of a Black woman for the pleasure of others? To forever be consumed by those outside ourselves? To kill ourselves in service to others? I can't help but read that first line as "what if I said I'm dying." Would the response still be the same? 

I am remembering myself as a reader of this book, before I started thinking critically about it. When I could dip my toe in and pull it out when it started to burn. I realize that I spent a lot of this post talking about the first page and that is partly due to the fact that I am working on my own first page but also because the rest of this book is still making its way through my digestive tract. There are a ton of poems I would have loved to touch on but since this is nearing the end I want to make sure I say that “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl” (29) is the kind of poem that burrows underneath the deepest layers of your skin. Both form and content zigzag in a way that gives me some Zong! vibes, the visceral motion sickness that somehow maintains a rhythm and a pattern. 

Thanks for reading! 
xoxo, 
Rai