Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas

African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner

CHIYUMA ELLIOTT, RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS, DERRICK HARRIELL, RANDALL HORTON, JAMAAL MAY

William Faulkner is an important (and polarizing) figure in African American letters. In Think Black, Haki Madhubuti declares, We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil.¹ In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison writes, I am in awe of the authority of Faulkner’s Benjy.² Few other American writers inspire such an impassioned range of creative response.

Previous scholarship has focused on Faulkner’s influence in fiction. This collection of poems considers instead what Faulkner means to contemporary African American poetry. The project was part of the Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas conference at the University of Mississippi, where three of the contributors (Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jamaal May, and Randall Horton) read and discussed their poems.

The conference and collection are part of a larger conversation about race, poetry, and literary legacies. A central theme of that conversation is the politics of influence. Specifically, what is at stake when African American artists declare a meaningful connection with a canonical dead white male author who is often lauded for his insights about race and African American culture? One perspective (succinctly articulated by Madhubuti) is that Faulkner is both a symbol and perpetrator of the exclusion of African Americans and needs to be violently erased from the black literary landscape; merely to evoke Faulkner is to perpetuate evil.

The potential danger of a relationship with Faulkner is also explored in My Friend Mary Stone from Oxford, Mississippi, by the late Lucille Clifton, which begins, We know we ought to be enemies.³ Though the speaker is explicitly talking about her improbable relationship with Mary Stone, the poem is, at least in part, a direct address to Faulkner. Or rather, to Mr. Faulkner, whose 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech the poem directly quotes. The honorific (Mr.) suggests both the high formal status of the addressee and also perhaps his distance (particularly if we read it as a racial marker of white privilege in the Jim Crow era). The speaker styles her hair to evoke the warrior women of Dahomey and is thus different from Mary Stone. And yet, according to the poem, there’s something important about transcending these differences, however exhausting and awe full that work is; we know we have to try it, says the speaker. At the end of the poem, the friends’ bodies are depicted as part of the same landscape: red as the clay hills and blacker than loam. And Mr. Faulkner, too, is linked to that place, and to the important connections being forged there.

At the time Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature, only one African American author had been awarded a major mainstream American literary prize (Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen had won a Pulitzer earlier in 1950). America’s brutal history of racial oppression meant that Paul Laurence Dunbar was the only black poet regularly in print before the publishing boom of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movement in the 1920s. As both Clifton and Madhubuti make plain, African American poets writing (or not writing) about Faulkner are often writing against and about this troubled literary backdrop.

At this moment, the relationship of African American authors to the American literary mainstream is changing in some dramatic ways, which makes a collection about poetic responses to Faulkner particularly exciting. Two events stand out. The 2011 Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, touched off a debate about its simultaneous inclusion of rarely lauded writers of color and exclusion of noted white poets (such as Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg).⁴ Also, for the first time, a spate of black poets was awarded the nation’s most prestigious literary prizes, including Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and commendations from the Library of Congress.

Shortly after Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey became the US Poet Laureate in 2012, Thomas Sayers Ellis read his poem All Their Stanzas Look Alike, about the literary establishment’s marginalization of black writers, to an enthusiastic crowd at a Cave Canem reading in Pittsburgh:

All their artist colonies

All their core faculties

All their stanzas look alike

All their Selected Collecteds

All their Oxford Nortons

All their Academy Societies

All their Oprah Vendlers

All their stanzas look alike

But this time, Ellis’s litany broke down before its written ending (which evokes Rita Dove, talks about exceptions, and maintains that Exceptional or not, / One is not enough). With the audience yelling the refrain in unison, Ellis reached the line All their Poet Laureates. But instead of finishing the poem as written, he instead grabbed his head, leaned back, and exclaimed Oooohhh! There was a long pause, during which the audience cheered. Then, after briefly resuming the poem, Ellis abruptly broke off and said, Now why Natasha had to go and do that! Black writers are collectively rethinking our relationship to the American literary canon, and Ellis’s reading both celebrated and dramatized this fact. The long-established narrative of African American literary exclusion is breaking down, and poets are self-consciously writing (and revising) in this moment of fracture.

Part of the work that each poem in this chapbook does is to define the terms of engagement with Faulkner and to make some sort of statement about the reason (or reasons) that connection matters. No two answers look alike. Faulkner was a voracious borrower, drawing on everything from plantation account books to popular blues lyrics to overheard speech. The poets in this volume are equally eclectic in drawing on his life and work. In some of the poems, Faulkner’s words are implicitly recast, as in Derrick Harriell’s All the Dead Pilots, which uses a Faulknerian epigraph about lean young men who once swaggered as prologue and counterpoint to an alternative story set in 1995 about a neighbor- / hood of angry Nikes and Jheri curls. Other poems hijack and reconfigure a short story’s narrative threads, as in Chiyuma Elliott’s For Emily, which uses Faulkner to link racism, romantic love, and fatherhood. Still other work turns on exploration of Faulknerian characters, such as Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Bundren Elegy, which repeats the word dying like a mantra as it asks and answers impossibly difficult and abstract questions: The grammar of nails? They go down in wood. The fiction of dying / soars like a flame. In Randall Horton’s Southern Dialect, the speaker suggests that, despite the use of detached formal terms like tonal beauty, writers who linger in delta speech are ultimately captives of its juju spell, albeit happy ones: i could sit for days in her cool / dialect swaying like tea leaves. In Jamaal May’s They May Come to Break Us (set in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1877), the epigraph from Faulkner’s Mistral casts the speaker’s vigilant lookout for the arrival of a lynching party as a kind of defiance: "You must either watch a fire or burn up in it." When we initially proposed the chapbook to fellow writers, it quickly became clear that most poets either already had written, or were itching to write, a Faulkner poem. The range of this response is what we hope we’ve adequately captured.

Thanks are due to the poets who shared their work with us. We also want to acknowledge Jay Watson, without whose support and encouragement neither the original chapbook nor the conference panel and reading would have come to pass. This project was financially supported by the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, as well as by several departments and programs at the University of Mississippi: African American Studies, the MFA Program, and the Department of English. We are grateful for the opportunity to share some beautiful and provocative new poetry and grateful to participate in an extraordinarily interesting conversation about Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas.

Chiyuma Elliott

Derrick Harriell

CHIYUMA ELLIOTT

Self-Portrait in Aposematic Colors

Self-portrait as your mother, the centipede.

As venom. With gazing ball, with rear-view mirror,

self-portrait in every reflective surface. Self-portrait

losing water through the skin. As your mother.

Writing all the ways she thought to kill you

deep in the woods. Self-portrait as the cabin.

You dropping a glass, unable to breathe. Self-portrait

opening the vein—like ripping out a hem.

Self-portrait casually holding you under.

Self-portrait as the road through the woods. Each rut

and detour. Because I remember everything

about your hands, how small they were. One of them

still grazes my cheekbone when I sleep.

Self-portrait as my mother, who only tried

to kill herself. Self-portrait on a dead leaf,

in aposematic colors: viper yellow, noxious red.

Saying M-my m-mother is a fish. Self-portrait.

Saying I sh-shall n-n-not want.

CHIYUMA ELLIOTT

Entourage

The candle gutters, the candle faints,

Bill dreams her body; slopes

into that whip-charm, forgets to breathe.

Next morning, northing birds whip

over Pascagoula. Trees ripple. Each leaf

one word of a prophecy, but disarranged.

Nothing makes sense. Except the curve

of her breasts under June linen. Or

her bare knees. Or the dry grass. Bill,

we, too, stupidly place things

in brown bags, they over-ripen.

We find waking unwieldy. How slovenly,

our use of the moon! How slack,

our use of tides! Too, our every song

ends with someone’s eyes.

CHIYUMA ELLIOTT

For Emily

How to explain it? Why you have to get up

so early in the morning, take a car ride

to the big town for school, away from

your friends. Emily, you saw a black lady

for the first time, and your daddy

was holding your hand. He watched

her gentle meet your curious halfway

across the sidewalk, then saw her eyes

go wary-tired when she looked him.

He did what he could. Quit wearing

baseball caps in town. Made you

into a tiny white neon sign

that flashed I am not the enemy.

Darling. I’d have called you Rose.

You’d have been black like me, and

none of this would have happened.

CHIYUMA ELLIOTT

Joe Christmas’s New Suit

1

Once upon a time a calf was worth a watch

and a new suit.

But even if you owned the calf,

there were rules about selling.

And when rules were broken

(like old china plates

against scrubbed wood floorboards)

the sound was terrible, but it didn’t echo.

You could keep on wanting,

and nothing would change.

2

Which one would you be?

He thinks, riffling his thumb over the book’s edge

as if there were a second half to shuffle.

Says, Not Joe.

3

Nothing is wasted.

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS

After Absalom

As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing.

—Toni Morrison

And what am I hunting in these groves, the words swilling through my consciousness, moon-sunken, shrunken spiders, fly-in-milk. And who am I hunting in these stalls, a bit in my mouth, my hair wild as blades, tilting flames & syllables, shining the tongue like a lamp in the grotto of the voicebox, bury that. Because I am looking the way you wanted, always wanted, not to look away at this. And I gather the limbs you’ve strewn, alphabet-shaped, incantatory, unrelenting as sunlight beneath mud. Because there are hints everywhere, the shadow of a blackcat dream, the dream of shadows shackled to whipping posts & wagon wheels, the gallop of tincture, the snout of pigment, illiterate pigmeat, the ivory jewels of feet shaped like coals. American majestic. American terror. It’s the same diamond. So shameless the summer undressing spring’s delicate throat with a kiss. Some of us land without a sound, turning back to watch the clouds fall over like a woman. O, motherless devil burning the fields. The sweet blood of flight slick as cane. The blue blood air wings forget. Because you know what we hunt, what we must know as we look into any face, shucking spirit from pulp. It slips between the thumbs, only to be dust. The things blood cannot do for us. Dusk-dyed flight edging the field with wails. It’s good enough for the blackbirds. One drop.

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS

Requiem, Yoknapatawpha County

Scythe these words to bones, roots.

The dead return like a wildfire, a hive of ghosts.

Apocryphal fields. Crows, eagles, buzzards.

What the slow water of memory remembers

like a face. Unknown in contour, a map.

The fields plowed by sparse vernacular, the fields

gouged by blood, the fields turning on their sides

to show the bruises we make early in the morning

through the stalls of stars at night.

Pass through blood, pass it under the pines,

let it grow as high as oaks, let the long clouds

squeeze it down, a veil frosting our shoulders,

the crowns of our speech. Carve these kings

& daughters to tongue. Raze every justice, cruel

as a gray rose. Where Moses went down, where

the railroad flung its black-lipped sutures, where

the spotted horses were seen, flailing like men

in love, tilling their lives in God’s spit.

The dead twisting like a terror in stories

when we open the book. Bones reaching

for their relatives, aching for how blood pours

volume over volume.

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS

Her White Children Bless Her

The dirt holds this, the words inside of stone, the flesh

of the law, the way it was, is, & may always never please never always

be. I’m looking for you, come across it. I need imagery, your lines

are fruit, tribes, whiskeys. You’re inside this seed. Sarcophagus of the anti-pastoral

America, a scribe. Lucid horseman. The matter of a man is

every man’s weight. The spines of your words rear, flash their eyes,

bare gin teeth, four-legged, flogged with rain, cheek. Words thunderous, hooves.

Days ago I thought about the last horse throwing you into air

& that you don’t fall, you don’t ever land, injured, & waiting

for the black gloves or the sanitarium where they will take

you closer. I thought about the body pulsing between your thighs,

the leather, the animal stars you struck as air ripped you up like the music

of oaks in rain. And whatever your face might have seen in the dark,

it was like that. It was what I can’t always see from the half-slave quarters

of my world. I’m mostly free. And when I remember the stones I wish I was the kind

of rain that could pull a man’s tongue out of his own destiny.

I wish I could bless the meaning of whiteness, which often

is defined as absence. Some say black & white are both

stains where all colors melt in the jury of bloodlines. The god

stone was marbled with both. And I’m not sure what Callie Barr Clark’s

laughter would sound like in the trees, wide & beloved. Everywhere I read,

an unseen voice, like a moon behind night, like a window half-opened

in a woman’s mouth, like the way I can’t always bear to look at history

but look anyway, saying nothing, everywhere an unseen voice

kindly repeats, "almost like family, almost . . ."

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS

Bundren Elegy

1

Who has washed her face? Poured with the shadow of dying,

a woman trembles in a box. Her life chafes like the light

of wingless pain. This is the journey winter forgets, jerking

in spring with dying.

2

The world braced as paper. A horse kneeling, dying

in the love it obeyed. Trampled like a ghost in spring.

Will kindling burn in a fire of rain? Is it dying?

Their faces are white coal, magnolia, Bundren, stripped to scent.

Their eyes & buzzards are the same. Black with dying.

Pilgrims of elegy crawling to Jefferson, a cross of water

floods spring with dying.

Who has kissed Dewey Dell with poor ripening? Who unmade

a mother’s eyes? Mouthless, biting, her husband begrudging nothing?

What hunger saddled Jewel’s horse to buck in spring with dying?

3

The grammar of nails? They go down in wood. The fiction of dying

soars like a flame. They carried her impatiently like fire, spared

their dying everything but air. You are a country of fictions, bones,

& work music, you. The women were all singing in the still body.

A promise sanded like wood. Nothing moved. The opal fish splayed