Morgan Parker: “In the back of my mind I’m on a slave ship, yet I’m also here just telling you how it is.”
Conceived by Mary Wang, Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses screenshots from writers’ digital devices to understand their practice.
Some friends and I started a group chat to share the micro-aggressions that we experience daily. When these encounters feel too minuscule to say out loud, for fear of being disregarded or dismissed as the Black Person Who Cried Racism—like when a woman flips her blonde hair back into your face on the train, and a strand gets caught between your lips—we bring them to the thread. We also share the eulogies and photos we’d like the media to use should we be shot by a police officer—photos that don’t make us look like we deserved to be killed. We send suicide notes along with LOLs and memes of Joanne Prada. We named the chat Spiraling. The tragedy is effervescent, but the validation helps us survive.
Morgan Parker’s poetry collection Magical Negro collects and dissects these everyday acts of violence, and sets the invisible in verse. Parker’s words penetrate the bone and dig into the marrow, illuminating the fracturing that remains as consequence of living while black: Like the emails from white allies attesting to the importance of change, “now more than ever,” as if it wasn’t urgent enough over the last 400 years. Or when I’m counting the number of days between Independence Day and Juneteenth. Parker’s words are visceral and potent, while her comedic delivery makes stones go down like silk. “The hunted must be clever,” she writes in one of the poems, Toward a New Theory of Negro Propaganda. “The hunted has two primary tools of survival: imagination and hyperbole. Where the Negro might see luck in a collard green, the White might see $7.99 per pound.”
Shifting between the Atlantic slave trade and pop culture—Angela Bassett smoking a cigarette in a bathrobe, Diana Ross eating a rib—Parker centralizes the triple-consciousness of black womanhood in an exploration of consumption and being consumed. Much as she did in her first two poetry collections, and , Parker begins with her own interiority before moving outwards to examine the racial and examine the way the world engages with “black bodies,” and the way black beings begin to resent the melanated container in which their souls reside.
