The Under Review - Issue 4 | Summer 2021

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interweaves the atrocities of slavery into a description of the book’s cover photo, a Farm Security
Administration photograph published in 1941 and shot by Jack Delano, which depicts a Black woman and
a young boy standing in a doorway:
and her muscled forearms are fortressed
across the diagonal striped pattern
of her dress which toward the knee has two holes,
and suddenly like that her dress becomes
a map of the trades,
the holes of the bodies
of islands cast in the windcombed sea,
In the acknowledgements, Gay sites Amiri Baraka’s “An Agony As Now” and a separate, unpublished quote
of Baraka’s as influences on Be Holding: “At the bottom of the Atlantic ocean there’s a railroad of human
bones.” Be holding is a book length balancing act of the unbelievably painful and the soaring of delight and
care.
The commodification of Black people is at the heart of the book and given its focus on historical
photographs and the footage of Dr. J’s move, Be Holding becomes both a sharp critique of the racial gaze/
our practice of witnessing, and a reminder of the still rippling effects of the very first commodification of
Black life. Gay indicts one example of reckless witnessing by examining Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize
winning Marlborough Street Fire photograph, which depicts a Black woman and a young Black girl
plummeting from a collapsed fire escape. He writes:
—you have seen, I hope—
for in the photograph neither are they named
given as the photograph’s two titles
are Marlborough Street Fire
and Fire Escape Collapse,
and imply no violence or horror upon these two people,
Gay blows up one moment in history—The Doctor’s shot—taking a magnifying glass to all its pixelated
corners, stretching and melding that moment with nearly all of history. Movement like this makes
transitions a necessary precarity, but Gay manages it over and over with a sedated precision. Early in the
book he seamlessly slips out of a description of the flying Igbo myth and into a description of Dr. J’s flight
in the finals:
they shake loose and tumble from their ankles and wrists
erasing through the sky and into the sea
like names disappearing from a ledger,
hovering there like a school
ISSUE 4 | SUMMER 2021