Photo by Sumter County Gallery of Art
Ekphrastic
poetry is poetry based on works of art. I recently gave an ekphrastic poetry
reading at Sumter County Gallery of Art based on art by Antoine Williams. One
of his works is an installation called “What It Look Like”. It includes
elements such as tires, police caution tape, and flowers.
In my
opinion, it’s like a juxtaposition of our diverse emotions in our bodies. Zora
Neale Hurston said it this way in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored
Me.”
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red, and yellow…On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content any greatly.
Every
emotion in our brown bags has no business sharing space in the same body: love,
fear, anger, hate, depression, disappointment, excitement, apathy. In the Black
Lives Matter movement, every black body has purpose. Some may not appear as
civilized or Americanized as others. Some seem barbaric and savage, but what
else can be expected growing up in concrete jungles around our nation:
environments where men in uniforms and suits relegate black bodies to fractions
of a soul?
When the
emotions from the brown bag become volatile from being caged by preconceived
notions of blackness or even humanity, black bodies become known as thugs. The
word thug originated as gangster
terminology similar to the word goon,
or hired criminal. Not every angry black body fits this description.
Perhaps if
blacks were the ones who enslaved whites for centuries, then our culture would
be the benchmark for an already fractured society. However, it already is now
the benchmark. Black culture and rebellion is a cliché that white children mock
as well as embrace. White children borrow from black
bodies because they feel theirs is not enough. Having every opportunity as a
dominant race is not enough to them.
How could
they possibly believe this? It is because although black bodies have been
crushed and cramped into thin sheets by the thousands in ghettos, prisons, and
even classrooms, black bodies still bear a smile on the walls of their brown
bags. Black bodies dance, sing, and laugh, yet on the inside, the contents
within the bags decay in silence. They see blacks’ resolve and covet blacks’
resilience. Their parents call it uncivilized. Blacks call it culture and
heritage. That is how a gifted black man can take what they call trash from the
essence of himself and call it art.
2 comments:
Len, I don’t pretend to understand what it means to be black. However, to claim that “yet on the inside, the contents within the bags decay in silence” suggests that blacks have accepted failure in modern society. Most of the emotions in your brown bags (fear, anger, hate, depression, disappointment, apathy) are destructive to the people possessing them. And art doesn't mitigate the harm they can do. Surely all is not lost…
It is because although black bodies have been crushed and cramped into thin sheets by the thousands in ghettos, prisons, and even classrooms, black bodies still bear a smile on the walls of their brown bags. Black bodies dance, sing, and laugh, yet on the inside, the contents within the bags decay in silence. --- I like that. Keep up the good writing.
Post a Comment