Shane McCrae, Forgiveness

1. The Subject

Little Brown Koko goes by Koko

in the book as I remember it

Although he is    / Little and black although he is

Subject to the book

in the book as I remember it / Nobody calls him Little Brown Koko

nobody in the book

The writer calls him Little Brown

Koko and    / It doesn’t seem to matter that he’s little what

Matters is that he’s black

And even without the illustrations the

Reader would know he’s black

Because his name is Little first    then Brown

although     / Nobody calls him Little Brown

Koko in the book as I remember him

Although he is

subject to the book (“The Visible Boy”)

Sometimes the difficulty with receiving so many books in the mail is the occasional reminder of what might have slipped by, as other packages of books appear, one by one. While cleaning out some poetry titles from my office recently, I realized I had a copy of one of New York poet Shane McCrae’s earlier titles, Forgiveness (Hadley MA: Factory Hollow Press, 2014), discovered well after having read and reviewed his fifth and sixth full-length collections In the Language of My Captor (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and more recent The Gilded Auction Block (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Forgiveness is McCrae’s third full-length title, after Mule (2011) and Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), and opens with a fascinating examination of racist tropes through what not that long ago was considered appropriate children’s literature (I remember the same, from my own childhood, only half a decade older than the author), moving through the fictional “Little Brown Koko” to pull apart the inherently violent and debasing stereotypes of black people, and black “boys” in what presented itself as children’s story. As this first sequence of eleven poems ends:

I saw him also in the words

but wrong in the words / In my    head as I read the words

His body    / Hadn’t been

flattened swelled until it wasn’t anymore

a body     until it was

a white man’s black boy’s body

“Koko” returns in a further sequence, later in the collection. I’m fascinated, through Forgiveness, to get a clearer sense of how McCrae has been utilizing poetry as a means to explore and critique cultural trauma, legacies and their ongoing effects. How does one negotiate with and navigate through such an ongoing history? Through “Koko,” and  among other poems that thread throughout the collection, Forgiveness exists almost as a character sketch of the accumulated effects of racism and its myriad abuses—from slavery and repeated murders to racist depictions of black people to the daily micro-aggressions of ongoing discrimination—articulated into a precise and powerful lyric. As Annie Won writes in her review of the book for American Microreviews and Interviews: “It has been said that unlike other memories, trauma continues to make its presence known until we make our peace with it; all other memories run currents around the trauma to understand and reconcile what has happened.” The book opens with forgiveness, but speaks to how the very idea might even be impossible, especially without, at the very least, the open admission of continued abuses and further trauma; he speaks to trauma, and to how trauma could change anyone. As he writes to end the poem “The Sweet Kids”:

Lord if I smashed his nose with the end of the pipe

Lord if I wept    Lord when I found

The sparrow with the broken wing    on the path in the forest

Lord if I took it home and killed it

blubbering as I threw it / Against the guest room wall

how I am spared

If I killed what I could

Shane McCrae, The Gilded Auction Block

EVERYTHING I KNOW

ABOUT BLACKNESS I LEARNED

FROM DONALD TRUMP

“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an

amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

            – Donald Trump

American I was driving when I heard you

Had died I swerved into a ditch and wept

In the dream I dreamed unconscious in the ditch

America     I dreamed you climbed from the ditch

You must believe your body is and any

Body and stood beside the ditch for eight years

Thinking     except you didn’t stand you right

Away lay down on your pale belly

And tried to claw your way back to the ditch

You right away began to wail     and weep

And gnash your teeth     my tears met yours in the ditch

America     they carry my downstream

A slave on the run from you     an Egyptian queen

And even in my dreams I’m in your dreams

In the powerfully-lyric The Gilded Auction Block (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), his sixth full-length poetry title, New York City poet Shane McCrae directly responds to an America represented by and irrevocably altered by President Donald J. Trump. The Gilded Auction Block furthers the concerns presented in his previous collection, In the Language of My Captor (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017) [see my review of such here], which is, admittedly, the only other of his work I’ve seen (something I have to correct at some point, obviously). From what I am aware, McCrae’s work confronts head-on the repercussions and continued effects of America itself, from slavery and subjugation, colonialism and systematic oppressions that have become foundational throughout much of the European settlement of North America, and within the very myth of The United States of America: the hypocrisy of a colonial oppressor repeatedly flag-waving freedom and oppression (I’m not letting Canada off the hook here, by the by, but that isn’t what McCrae’s book is about). For McCrae’s The Gilded Auction Block, the “contemplation of American racial history” (as Henry Louis Gates Jr. referred to McCrae’s work) is there as the underlying structure, but the propulsion of the collection is entirely on and around the current American President, from what racist and ignorant cultural forces allowed him into that position, to his own words and actions, which become difficult to satirize, simply for how ridiculous (and inherently dangerous) he is, and has become. “America you’re what a turnout great / Crowd a great crowd big,” he writes, to open the poem “THE PRESIDENT VISITS THE STORM”: “smiles America / The hurricane is everywhere   but here an / Important man is talking here   Ameri- / ca the important president is talking [.]”

Shane McCrae, In the Language of my Captor

My grandfather—although I didn’t know whether he would have described himself in this way—was a white supremacist. He wouldn’t have been ashamed to admit that he believed white people were superior to black people—especially superior to black people in particular—indeed, he happily—or, really, “gleefully,” would probably be a better word, since white supremacists don’t ever seem happy so much as gleeful—admitted to this belief many times when I was a child. But I suspect he might have thought the phrase “white supremacist” was too fancy for him. He had been, as a child, the younger brother of a much larger boy, and, along with his older brother Thomas, and his younger brother, Raymond—who grew up to become a landlord, who would eventually be shot through the neck by a tenant he had evicted a few days before, and would die in a soft-top convertible, blood spraying from his neck, his head rolling slightly from side to side on his shoulder as he pointed toward a narrow gap between two dumpsters, wordlessly urging his wife, who was already crawling away from the car, to safety—as a child, he had lived in poverty, in the wake of the Dust Bowl, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Because of and despite this, he hated “white trash” almost as much—although the hate was a different kind of hate, a sad duty—as he hated blacks, my father especially. (“Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons”)

What strikes, beyond the obvious elements, of Ohio poet Shane McCrae’s fifth full-length collection, In the Language of my Captor (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), are the rhythms of his lines, a cadence that bounces, staccatos, shifts and lifts through and out the other end of an extremely powerful evocation of power and language lost, frayed, betrayed and rebuilt. I am curious to hear how these poems would be read aloud, enjoying the collisions and collusions his rhythms and phrases accomplish. The poems in In the Language of my Captor are centred around racial tensions—cultural, historical and deeply personal— in a book of rage, acknowledgment, inquiry and violence, as McCrae moves between what appears to be memoir and research, articulating a sequence of abandonment, dislocation and systematic racism, and writing a history that is still very much present. As he writes to close the poem “Banjo Yes Recalls His First Movies”: “White folks stay clean / ‘cause how they own you is they own     your options // You can be free / Or you can live [.]”

McCrae’s title is reminiscent of the late Vancouver poet Roy Kiyooka’s own engagement with writing “inglish,” employing his own take of the oppressor’s language as a response to racist attitudes toward Japanese Canadians, and racism in general, while declaring himself very much a presence, as both artist and human. As did Caliban against Prospero, how does one move through the language of the oppressor? Constructed as a book-length suite, McCrae’s In the Language of my Captor is a damned good book of poems, and writes an evocation of what is still so painfully relevant, and desperately required.

JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF

JEFFERSON DAVIS WAS ANOTHER CHILD FIRST

They put me in a dead boy’s clothes dead Joseph

Except he wasn’t dead at first they put

Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s      after Joseph

Died and I used to call him Joe      they put

Me in Joe’s clothes at first before he died

Joe wasn’t five yet when I met him      I

Was seven      I was seven when he died

Still but a whole year bigger then but I

Wore his clothes still and the whole year I lived with

Momma Varina      and with daddy Jeff

I never lived so good as when I lived with

Them and especially it was daddy Jeff

Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes

Until they fit as tight as bandages