Dear Aja Monet,
Last week I stood in a too-empty amphitheater next to a confederate statue in downtown Tampa for a vigil for Breonna Taylor, six months after she was shot in her sleep. My whiteness was as it never is—so obvious and de-centralized. The womxn speaking, crying, calling in front of me begged for a less conditional life. A life where they can “trust / what truth / reveals” (Labor Movement, p.xiii). Women “carrying other women in [their] mouths” (#sayhername, p.53). I watched as these women tried to name a horror so complete it doesn’t fit in the mouth of even every Black womxn, exhausted from endless fighting for rights I am allowed inherently. This horror spills out endless.
In your collection, My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter, you build a creation narrative, wondering at the learned and unlearned legacies of people of color. You have odes to many of these things that create and break: “worship / the umbilical cord,” “the mothers who did the best they could,” “Cleveland Street,” speaking, “magick,” the “fuck you flung at my face / by mother,” “rapture or mere spasm.”
Learned: “legacy”, when we are brought to that age-old promise made by America to its people of color, that they are “built for jails” (p. 32). The way mothers lie and never take no for an answer to break that flesh-eating curse. The world still “laugh[ing] at the sport of us dying” (“the young”, p. 42) while the “mothers raise their children to become flowers, “pass failures / on to our youth” (“the young”, p. 43). This collection isn’t “fighting for freedom or justice / [it’s] fighting for a soul, sold” (“the young”, p.43).
Unlearned:
i felt honored
how we wound and heal
in the caves of our hoods
how black and brown girls
gather and peel
comparing stretch marks
and playground scars. (p. 23)
In these words and so many other poems in this collection, you create spells that carry womxn of color back to themselves. The poems therein are meant to hold dearly to the tenderness that is ripped from the image of them, ripped from them when that first trigger is held in their face.
Womxn of color, more than anyone, are the “stories [they] tell / [themselves]” (inner city chants, p. 2) because everyone is at the bat ready to tell them who they are. This work is built on listening. We see the word appear again, again in this body of work, the feminine self absorbing and empathizing, becoming every moment of need until the listening is a scalpel to the self. We see this fight between what we say, hear, and are over and over again.
And we see cultural shifts, that shadow beast racism has become. How “these days black people / don’t hang from trees / we linger on eyeballs / of newsfeeds” (“the whistleblower”, p. 49), in “stories only a hiss can tell.” We have started to let these hisses be heard. These reverberations of a hurt and hate so deep they disturb every American pore. So deep that when we mourn and hold vigils for Breonna Taylor, we are holding vigils for every Black womxn who feels it is a matter of when she will die, rather than that invincible “if” of white-hood. Your poetry was meant for revolution, was meant to be read aloud alongside Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine. Your poems pull the hate and joy of being Black in America up to our eyes and sing us awake. You do this so much so that I cannot resist printing almost a whole poem below (forgive me, editors). This book sharpens all the blades that need to be sharpened, lays to sleep what needs to slumber, and holds tightly to those who have been held away from their own tenderness. Thank you for writing this:
i saw how brown and black boys grow
into themselves angry at the world
that day how no matter what
a sister did to show her love
she couldn’t make a boy no man
he wasn’t bent on becoming
even when i thought i was fighting him
i was fighting them
we were always fighting them
all those people out there fighting us
doing everything to remind us
of our place
and i couldn’t undo
all the hate that builds
watching the men you love cower
watching the men you love cower
bend
kneel to the scowls of overseers
all the bright and magic that dims
the light lowers
the bright and magic
dims
being policed for being
too poor
too much a shade of color
too close to the root
too close to the color
the shade
too close
to the color of a beating
being beaten
beating heart (from “the first time”, p. 46-47)
Your fan,
Haley Morton
