Poetry / Joanne Godley
:: The Hardest Read ::
Inspired by The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and
Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture, by Vincent Woodward,
and after Catherine Pierce
In protest, I say the word delectable. Woodward’s text-title has, for me, rancid-washed this word’s flavor. In protest, I repeat the word, delectable. Craggy letter-bits stick in my craw. Once a pleasing and delitable word, for me, is delectable, no more. I spit it out. In protest, I say the word, Negro, and find me shadowed in a corner, flirting with views past and upon me. Years ago, at Thanksgiving, my brother asked, Why don’t they sell Negro turkeys? No one in our family ate the white meat. In protest, I say the word, voyeur. I stare out the window onto the street lush with jacarandas. My new country. The purple canopied calles of my neighborhood, are named for poets and statesmen. Maimonides. Arquemides. Lamartine. In protest, I say, I have done the thing. This fucking thing. I crawled out of the beast’s belly and slithered away. Breathing. Human. Black. Gut juices painting my path. My dreams creep back, enter my bedroom with caution, lest I relapse. In protest, I reclaim the word ease. I say the words copiousness and abundance, in near disbelief. I nap, voraciously. I am overdue for a leaching. In protest, I say the word sinuousness. I say the word luminescence. I remember night-quiet, wintered Philadelphia, ice-sliding Osage Avenue with R., translucent spears clinging to skeletal trees and telephone lines. My grandfather steepled churches using wood gathered from the Great Dismal Swamp. Watch me maroon, fellow maroons. Watch me prosody. Watch me cacophony while incognito, persnickety into clandestine. I am the right brand of paranoid. And with perfect tastebuds, no delectable for me. Watch me polish the ‘I’ in thrive.
:: Gone ::
1I was born I was born I burst bookish into poetry & charismatic color nearly blacklisted but hallelujahed by countrymen not my own swam under sprouting clouds I was born testing testing in a place Neruda dubbed ‘Dawn’s Rosy Cheek’ I spoke Yiddish soon after I was born schvartze means Black I was born I hankered for chitlin’s & oxtails enjoyed forbidden fruits I wailed the blues with an ear for opera but no peonies or peace lilies for me I grooved with Pete Seeger I worshipped Paul Robeson & we marched we protested we believed we patienced I lusted for excellence I sought success (American style) I was born justice-oriented for all like King I was born dreamer Like Langston I deferred dreams too After reading We Charge Genocide at age 9 I plotted expatriation at the age of 10 realized I was born in a place ripe with false promises & hoods my country tis of thee sweet land I embraced your values I drank your tea then dropped your mic this caged bird flew because this country that birthed me the Amerikkka I know does not love me back does not want me Black
From the writer
:: Account ::
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented a book-length petition to the United Nations entitled, We Charge Genocide, The Crime of Government Against the Negro People. This book documented (with graphic photographs) hundreds of lynching cases of Black Americans known to have occurred in the eighty-five years since the end of slavery (the number is estimated at 10,000 individuals.) I happened upon this book at the age of nine. I was a voracious reader and had been given carte blanche to read any book in my parents’ library. I was aghast and wondered what could possibly provoke a person, or groups of people, to levy such cruelty on other human beings. I promised myself, that, given the opportunity, I would leave the United States to live in another society. As I grew older, I developed a sense of dual self-perception, of which WEB DuBois spoke, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 2). This dual self-perception was another reason for my leaving the U.S.
The concept of flight figures prominently in my poetry, particularly, once my path to expatriation became clearer. I have grown interested in the concept of maroonage and have researched extensively the history of maroons (enslaved people who fled their bondage and sought refuge in swamps or hills) in the U.S. and the Caribbean. I have also done research on the African American folklore about the ‘flying Africans’, Blacks who escaped enslavement through flight.
Joanne Godley lives in Mexico City, having emigrated from the U.S. a year ago. She is a physician, writer, poet, and a first year MFA candidate in Poetry. She is a Meter Keeper in the Poetry Witch Community and an Anaphora Arts fellow in both poetry and fiction. Her poetry has been published in the Bellevue Literary Review, Mantis, Light, FIYAH, Pratik, among others. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her prose has been published in the Massachusetts Review, the Kenyon Review online, Juked, Memoir, among others. Her poetry chapbook, Picking Scabs from the Body History,features poems of witness and resistance. Her website is: joannegodley.com