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    In the Language of My Captor
    In the Language of My Captor
    In the Language of My Captor
    Ebook77 pages39 minutes

    In the Language of My Captor

    By Shane McCrae

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017)

    Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateJan 17, 2016
    ISBN9780819577139
    In the Language of My Captor
    Author

    Shane McCrae

    Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; Sometimes I Never Suffered, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and his most recent collection, The Many Hundreds of the Scent. McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

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      Book preview

      In the Language of My Captor - Shane McCrae

      1

      His God

      I am the keeper tells

      Me the most popular exhibit

      You might not think this cheers me but it does

      I’m given many opportunities

      I like especially to ask the groups

      Led by fat white men I am careful to

      Never address the fat man but the group

      How has it come // To pass

      that I’m on this side of the bars

      And you’re on that side

      And Who stands in your shoes

      You or the people you resemble

      they don’t give me shoes // I say

      Gesturing toward a zoo employee

      and I smile

      Often the people do not answer me

      Often the fat man squints and says It real- // ly makes you think

      Something like that or There

      but for the grace of God / I tell the keeper they must be

      The daughters and the sons of nearer gods

      I tell him my gods had to stay behind

      To watch my people / He likes it when I talk like that

      the truth is I don’t know

      The keeper when he’s drunk

      Sometimes he says I’m lucky

      To have been rescued from my gods

      And I should thank the man who bought me

      I used to laugh at him but now I grieve

      I think // His god is not a god like mine / His god

      Is not a mother not a father

      not a hunter not a farmer

      his / God is a stranger

      from no country he has seen

      Panopticon

      The keeper put me in the cage with the monkeys

      Because I asked to be

      Put in the cage with the monkeys

      Most of the papers say the monkeys

      must // Remind me of my family

      The liberal papers say the monkeys must

      Remind me of my home

      The papers don’t ask me

      some days // I tuck notes explanations

      Into soft monkey shits

      and call white children to the bars

      I warn the parents / But still they let their children come

      And that’s my explanation / I am

      their honest mirror

      I say Whether you’re here

      to see me or to see the monkeys

      You’re here to see yourselves

      Privacy

      I tell the keeper I don’t know

      What he or any white man means

      When he says privacy

      Especially

      In the phrase In the privacy

      Of one’s own home / I understand

      he thinks he means a kind of

      Militarized aloneness

      If he would listen I would tell him

      Privacy is impossible

      If one’s community is

      Not bound by love

      Instead I tell him where I’m from we

      Have no such concept

      If he thinks I am / Too wise

      he won’t speak honestly

      And so I make an / Effort to make

      my language fit his

      Idea of what

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