american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

He continues that “he had identified at a great distance with the black
rage that was exploding” but then saw who he really was: “a guy
who’d made his peace with America.” He has said, moreover,
that “They Feed They Lion” is “an effort to come to terms with
[the emotion of] being that guy” (“Staying Power” 23).
This impulsive guilt and confused identity make the AAVE powerful
and self-incriminating rather than exploitative, but the reading
problematically requires comments outside the poem. The compromised
first-person speaker does not appear explicitly until the fifth and
final stanza as a collective representative of white guilt and sadness,
but also of privilege. The lion, which is fed on the injustices perpetrated
against African Americans, literally grows from the white
speaker: “From my five arms and all my hands, / From all my white
sins forgiven” and “From my car passing under the stars” and “from
my children” the lion grows (34; my emphasis). What Fred Marchant
has called the “disconcerting, ambiguous nature of the persona”
(306), though accurate and emblematic of equivocal agency, is less
ambiguous given the prominence of “my white sins” and Levine’s
comments about his status as “that guy.” The poem shows that he
himself is the cause of African American rage. Levine’s speaker would
likely agree with the speaker of Rich’s “For the Record” for he has
certainly answered its question: “ask yourself where you were.”
Levine’s inclusive vision of urban poverty (via the specifics of
Detroit) is a gumbo of industrial materials, foods, waste products,
deceased people, body parts, and rage being cooked “on the oil-stained
earth.” Detroit is in effect a huge skillet greased with “bearing butter,”
“tar,” “creosote,” “gasoline,” “rain,” and the “sweet glues of the
trotters”; “out of ” this volatile, highly flammable surface “They Lion”
is continually fed. The raw materials of the city go into the skillet; they
are the materials of urban squalor that contribute to and are symptomatic
of poverty, oppression, and despair. The first stanza reads like a
recipe for riot. With its repetition, syntactical parallelism, and de facto
ingredients, “They Lion grow(s)” as yeast rises in an oven:
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor or tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 105
The materials are earthy, rugged, elemental, and mostly physically
tangible objects. In the second stanza, though, they become more