american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

112 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
differences between crows and blackbirds in the poem; they appear to
be one in the same, perhaps just “different ways of looking” at or
referring to a blackbird.
The final third of the poem takes the image of tongues and submits
it to a surreal series of “Problem”/“Solution” statements. The “solutions”
are more terse and piercing than the previous “answers.” The
speaker’s short, clipped sentences are disturbing and dismissive. These
mock dialogues are structured in the manner of logical, philosophical
proofs, but the solution statements are never logical. Here is the first
systematic interchange:
Problem: What would we do with 13 little black tongues?
Solution: Give them away. Hold them for ransom. Make belts.
Little nooses for little necks.
In this first “problem,” Moss alludes specifically to Stevens, but now
the blackbirds are tongues. The “solution,” moreover, includes four
options, all of which imply that black tongues have no autonomy; the
four solutions portend slavery, subjugation, physical exploitation, and
murder. No further explanation is needed to elucidate the role of
these “solutions” in the historical treatment of African Americans.
The final “Problem”/”Solution” lines appropriately end the poem
with the most forthright perspective on the blackbird. The “Problem”
is disheartening in that it summarizes the lack of human compassion
that characterizes racism: “Problem: No one’s in love with the blackbirds.”
Despite the riddling nature of Moss’s poem, the sentiment
here is understandable. Moreover, it has a crushing pathos absent in
the rest of the poem, except perhaps in the line about “holding hands
and hugging.” The enormity and emotion of this problem is made
even more so by the speaker’s jarring “Solution.” The commas that
separate the parts of the solution suggest a logical, step-by-step connection
between the parts, unlike in the previous, disconnected, fourpart
solution: “Paint them white, call them visions, everyone will
want / one.” This “solution” is ugly, but it is the culmination of a
“reconsideration” that starts with Jim Crow, moves on to Nigger,
then to self-destructive tendencies, then to murder and oppression,
and finally to a self-effacing erasure of blackness altogether in favor of
whiteness.
Moss’s elliptical approach aptly ends with this solution. Because the
“blackbird” and black identity in general have been historically
defined by white, Western, political-religious, imperial powers as evil,
primitive, inferior, and/or subhuman, the “rational” culmination is a