american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

42 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
which is an especially important assertion of blackness given that
Harper’s wife is white. In these cases, the speaker’s experiences are
heard from the voices of two perspectives, both as individual father
and as archetypal father, a tactic that serves to create a collective space
of shared experience with readers as (black) fathers and parents.
Joseph A. Brown once wrote that for Harper “no moment or
matter is too private to be exorcised in a healing song” (215).
Though “Deathwatch” elegizes a sad private event, it also indicts
and exorcises U.S. racist history. The first two stanzas combine the
poet as father’s experience with the poet’s knowledge of medical terminology
learned as a premedical student. The cold, impersonal
terms “episiotomy,” “placenta,” “adrenalin holes,” “autopsy,” and
“disposal papers” convey a measured distance from their human
implications. Jahan Ramazani, discussing another Harper elegy,
writes that Harper’s interaction with his son “has been mediated and
mutilated by the impersonal, objectifying discourse of the hospital”
(Poetry of Mourning 257), and so it is here. When the poem connects
discrete personal experience to broader sociocultural contexts,
it is subtle but pragmatic. The leap is necessitated by events—when
the speaker and his wife “sign the autopsy / and disposal papers,”
the event is symbolically framed by the implications of dying black in
a white-controlled country. The papers are “in black ink / on white
paper / like the country” in which the speaker’s son was born. For
Harper, personal experience is inseparable from politics and, as
Ramazani points out, “death and mourning are bound to a grid of
blackness and whiteness,” which gives the speaker no choice but to
view the loss “through the lens of his racial experience” (258–259).
Harper also explores an idea interrogated in depth by Leslie
Catherine Sanders in her book on the development of African
American drama (The Development of Black Theater in America:
From Shadows to Selves 1988): African American artists and citizens
exist largely on white cultural ground. Although this condition may
be changing with the popularity of African American cultural
forms such as hip-hop and with the increasing Latina/o population,
Harper’s lines suggest that this country has been written by, built
by, and made visible by the arts, lives, deaths, labor, and blood of
African Americans, with little official, institutional recognition for
their efforts apart from death certificates and disposal papers. The
implication is a lament that African Americans are most visible in
their deaths, which has certainly been true for rap stars Tupac
Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., both of whom gained in celebrity
after their murders.