american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 111
and below). The following couplet takes the next step from thinly
disguised racism directed at the blackbird—Reconstruction-era Jim
Crow laws—to a declaration of direct racism: “Let’s call him Nigger
and see if he rises / faster than when we say abracadabra.” These first
three lines make obvious Moss’s Stevensesque consideration of the
blackbird from multiple perspectives; indeed, the first three lines look
at racism from two perspectives. However, the next three
fragments/stanzas turn surreal and elusive as if to disrupt any systematic
attempt to understand racism and how it affects the identity of the
blackbird. Each fragment begins with a perplexing, ungrounded question.
They are, in order: “Guess who’s coming to dinner? ”; “What do
you find from here to eternity?”; and “Who never sang for my father?”
The first response is comical in the speaker’s address to the reader as if
she were at the gaming table: “Score ten points if you said blackbird. /
Score twenty points if you were more specific, as in the first line.” The
second “answer” is simple: “Blackbirds.”
The third response is lengthy, complex, and violent. The syntax is
confusing, but its import is not. Here the blackbirds are not the
oppressed but the oppressors. They “landed on the roof / and pressed
it down, burying us alive.” Are the definitions of blackness imposed on
African Americans oppressive? Do they bury black people under an
array of negative images? The speaker implies these questions and that
African Americans neither have the power nor the time to escape
negative definitions: “Why didn’t we jump out the windows? Didn’t we
have enough / time?” Here the crushing weight of historical racism is
destructive, but a few lines later some of its consequences are styled as
positive and unifying. Presumably in the house being “pressed” upon
by the blackbirds, the inhabitants unite in common cause for survival:
“We were holding hands and hugging like never before. / You could
say the blackbirds did us a favor.” But—this is a major rebuttal—the
speaker immediately denounces this statement with a declarative “Let’s
not say that however.” The speaker seems to think and speak simultaneous
to the poem’s moment of becoming, rapidly reconsidering each
and every thought she has on the blackbird and its blackness.
This refashioning leaves space for negotiation and self-definition
and for evading imposed definitions. Immediately after the speaker’s
rebuttal, she offers an alternative and an ultimatum. The alternative is
to “let the crows speak.” This ultimatum is formulated simply—“Let
them use their tongues or forfeit them”—but difficult in its import,
especially as it is unclear how it would be best for crows to use their
tongues. More critically, what is the significance of crows speaking?
Why crows here and not blackbirds? It is difficult to uncover