When The Living Sing, Don’t Call Us Dead: Surviving Black Death in the Poetry of Danez Smith and Yalie Kamara
“how long
does it take
a story
to become
a legend?
how long before
a legend
becomes
a god or
forgotten?”
Danez Smith poses us these difficult questions in “not an elegy,” a blistering meditation on survival that confronts the murders and suicides of different Black people. These lines are a direct call-and-response to the epigraph of their sophomore collection of poetry Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017). Smith introduces the collection with Drake’s hook on “Legend,” the opening track of his 2015 mixtape “If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late,” where the Cash Money rapper brags, “Oh my god, oh my god, if I die, I’m a legend.” Smith’s questions pull an awestruck Drake by the collar to interrogate what it actually means to become a legend when you die. ¿What does it mean be at risk of becoming Biggie Smalls or Mike Brown? For Drake, this realization is one of his greatest accomplishments. There’s the pride of knowing you’re a living legend—like Drake, like Danez—dominating the game and knowing your death would be a tragedy; then, there’s the dumbfounded pride and despair of knowing you’re a living legend, dominating the game and knowing your death will be a tragedy and because of the color of your skin, even that won’t save you; those who share your hue will never be afforded that privilege. They will never have their death properly mourned and have that mourning legitimized by the so-called justice system. “what legend did we deny their legend?” Smith asks. ¿What happens when that same legend is mythologized or forgotten? ¿How does it change the way we envision ourselves and, thereby, envision the world?
It is into this screaming assault on the sanctity of Black life that both Danez Smith and Yalie Kamara publish their new collections of poetry. Both collections find complementary, at times opposing, ways to transcend the grief of Black life in the United States. Danez Smith’s collection confronts the consequences of two fatal epidemics, white supremacy and HIV/AIDS, and wrings from their suffering the magnanimity to face the brutal realities of these diseases, as well as the unconquerable ability to imagine and enact a wondrous life within and without them. Yalie Kamara’s debut chapbook When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017), on the other hand, unpacks the rupture she experienced as a first-generation Sierra Leonean-American and finds in song the grace to transform the anguish of Black death and dislocation into the triumphant joy of survival. When I read Don’t Call Us Dead, I long for the bonebreaking joy of Kamara. When I read When the Living Sing, I long for the unflinching frankness of Smith’s eyes surveying his America. I am writing about both these collections together because I cannot read one without hearing the voice of the other harmonize and counterpoint.
A look at their cover images highlight the resonances in their collections. When the Living Sing is inaugurated by a photograph Kamara took during her time living abroad in France. In it, a graffitied pair of scissors are about to cut free a heart-shaped balloon from its earthly tethers. The pairing of the image with the title implies that when the living sing, we unbind our hearts. By “couper ici” or “cutting here,” we can transcend beyond our worldly worries and limitations. Kamara’s songs are at times cutting and painful, but always, they are life-saving.
The cover image of Don’t Call Us Dead includes a similar image of balloons and flight: “the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it,” a visceral image by visual artist Shikeith Cathey. Cathey’s work mines the too-often unacknowledged depths of Black masculinity, depicting Black men at their most vulnerable, at times naked, selves. In the cover image, two nude young black men ascend into an off-white sky. The first looks down in the precarious space between fear, reflection, and doubt, holding the delicate string of a black balloon in his left hand and the hand of another young black man in his right. The second looks up (¿hopefully?) to the slightly larger, slightly higher young man. The vulnerability here—the bravery and fear as they dare to do the unthinkable and take flight—is captured by the stark contrast between black and white and the expressive language of their profiles. The title of the image undergirds the entire piece with fear. ¿Will they stay faithful to the possibility of their flight? The title of the image implies that their ability to transcend hinges on something more precarious than “couper ici,” namely the fortitude of their faith to persist in the face of unspeakable odds.
The title of Smith’s collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, stretches the reach of the symbolic lexicon of the cover even further, opening up a slick allusion to the story of the Flying Africans. I first heard about the Flying Africans in conversation with Ross Gay, where he questioned me about the ways myth and metaphor illuminate and/or obscure violence. Igbo people, the mythology goes, survived the Middle Passage and upon reaching the shores of Savannah, Georgia, collectively decided to escape, to fly back home. According to wyt folks, in this case slave owner Roswell King, the group collectively walked into the ocean and drowned themselves to escape the horrors of slavery. According to over 200 years of African American folklore and literary tradition, however, the Igbo peoples flew back to Africa, sometimes as buzzards, sometimes joining hands and spinning in a circle until they rose into the sky and flew away. Like the story of the Flying Africans, the black boys and men that populate Smith’s heavens and earth have their lives denied, defined by their proximity to death; Smith creates in their poems a world where Black folk are given relief from violent death—with or without magic. Like the story of the Flying Africans, the Black folk who populate Kamara’s world find themselves “too beautiful not to be in hiding”; Kamara enacts through her poems a world where song can save us.
I began this conversation with Smith’s “not an elegy” because it drives at the heart of Ross Gay’s question—¿what is the role of myth and metaphor in illuminating and/or obscuring violence?—and illuminates Kamara and Smith’s differences in responding to other important questions, namely ¿how does one overcome the grief in Black life in the United States? ¿what are the powers of prayer and song? ¿what are the limits? The second section of “not an elegy,” which is a remix of “not an elegy for Mike Brown,” a poem that went viral during the Ferguson riots and resistance in 2014, begins “i am sick of writing this poem,” a line that captured the pain and despair of so many Black writers speaking against police brutality that it has since become a cliché in the Black literary community. We enter this section of the poem with an immediate dismissal and frustration with the limits and redundancy of poetry, which like the courts, are useless in providing violated communities reprieve and justice. Smith rightly escalates the fight by the end of the third stanza, demanding “a war to bring the dead child back. / i at least demand a song. a head.” Here, the surprise is after the nausea felt of yet another Black life lost, of again needing to write the poem, the song, Smith reasserts the value of song and song’s important role in healing, despite the obvious need to ascertain justice for the victims of police brutality from the perpetrators. In the last section of “not an elegy,” Smith laments “i have no words to bring him back, i am / not magic enough.” If this sentiment is expressed with despair, it is not expressed with fatalism. What is so powerful about Smith’s work is that they does not fail to see and recount the devastation before them; they may flail, they may bite and kick and cry, but Smith never surrenders.
On the back cover, poet laureate Tracy K. Smith notes, “Don’t Call Us Dead gives me a dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by.” I’m not sure if hope is the right word. As Danez Smith suggests in a recent Mic50 interview, “to be real, the future sorta sucks. At least the one our collective imagining is leading to. It’s dry, like no water dry, and sad.” Hope is a precious comfort no one wants to abandon. I know because I’ve shouted my grief in the streets as one of the leaders of the sanctuary campus movement in my college town, and I’m now invited to speak at panels on activism and immigration. One of the questions our brilliant, beautiful, and exhausted young never fail to ask is “¿how do you stay hopeful?” We don’t know what we’d do without hope. When I look around my Americas, families torn apart by deportation, all the #metoo statuses by friends, family members, and lovers I have had, the endless list of grievances we share, hope is not what keeps me going. Hope is a poor solution for injustice.
I tell the young students that slavery took hundreds of years to “end” and those who lived under its yoke still fought and dreamed and gave their all to their loved ones. I hustle with no real expectations for change. I don’t have another word for what propels me personally, but this “little prayer” by Danez Smith feels close:
let ruin end here
let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter
let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs
let this be the healing
& if not let it be
The final stanza of this poem is the most important in the entire collection for me. What Smith offers us may not be healing, but it is the might and love to bear what we must.
While Smith’s work wrestles against the limitation of word, the limitation of song, Kamara’s entire collection is premised on capturing what does happen when the living sing. The chapbook opens with the Sierra Leonean proverb, “The song is done, the words remain,” a koan that dares me to believe we can live in song, in the healing and the emotional purity and beauty of it, that the words remain with us for a reason. Words are not just the dead bones of a song, the same way the bones of our loved ones are not just bones. In “Aubade For Every Room In Which My Mother Resides,” the first poem of the collection, Kamara listens to her mother’s singing, perhaps similar to Smith and definitely similar to myself, as a skeptic:
Before I knew her wail was a blues ballad,
I called her croon crazy. Thought this
a song I could do nothing with.
The youth in Kamara speaks with an arrogance the rest of the poem humbles and unravels. This is a powerful choice because the rest of the poem enacts for us the process of observing her mother pray and sing and then, Kamara praying and singing herself. “I am ready,” Kamara tells us halfway through the poem, and by the end, she is spelling her name in her throat, which is to find your identity, your inner strength. For Kamara, this is done by entering pain and expelling not the pain itself, but the root:
This is how she beckons me to hold this life,
with both hands, even when it aches like a
word shunted in bone.
I walk toward the sound of splinter exiting kin.
Dawn is peeling from dusk. And my mama
is teaching me how to depart from that
which does not love us.
Note: I always read this first poem backwards because I am not brave enough to read it forward. In reverse, each of the sections build to tell a story of betrayal of the mother’s heritage and a lack of access to prayer. Read forward, the right way, the reader is brought to their knees in prayer by the first poem of the collection. Kamara blesses you with “lungs that eat crystal”. The power to “make rubble sing”.
While Smith cries “i have no words to bring him back, i am / not magic enough,” in “Resurrection,” prayerful words of the Kamara clan perform a miracle. The poem chronicles the grief of Kamara’s family as they mourn the loss of the writer’s grandmother. Kamara bears witness to a visitation by the grandmother who visited them by night and partook of a dinner offering left to her by her children. “The dead only die when the living refuse to sing for them,” Kamara teaches us and thus, presses into our hand the delicate balloon string of miracle, the power to keep our loved ones close to us, almost as if they were alive.
And therein lies the tension that makes me hug both of these collections tight, the racquetball in my brain as I struggle to find my way out of my particular despairs and grief. My hand is clenched tight as a vice around the string of a balloon, and I’m not sure whether it’s confidence or fear, faith or doubt.
The power of Kamara’s work is that she knows how to read the darkness, and in it, find beauty, resilience and light. In “Oakland as Home. Home as Myth,” Kamara combats negative rhetoric that attempts to reduce Oakland to a bullet-ridden “killing field,” flattening the lives of those who live and love and find joy in the city. She tells us,
We are the bucktoothed city that made you wish you
never wore braces…
We fall and get back up again and tell you that we didn’t mean to make our
mistakes look like a dance. All that big booty attitude in those small Bay
Area jeans…
To claim this is a city of endless nightfall is easy. If they knew how to read darkness
they would have figured it out by now:
the object that casts the biggest shadow is the one closest to the light.
Compare this with Smith’s beautiful poem “tonight, in Oakland,” where he fantasizes that “tonight / guns don’t exist. tonight, the police / have turned to their God for forgiveness… tonight, prisons turn to tulips / & prisoner means one who dances in yellow field.” Here, Smith’s spirit must transform reality to achieve freedom and reclaim Oakland, while Kamara manages to root this joy in Oakland’s reality. Whereas in Smith’s world Black men and boys must die to call snow black, whereas in Smith’s reality even the Black guy’s profile reads sorry, no black guys, in “Sweet Baby Fabulist,” Kamara shares the story of how her three-year-old nephew calls everything he loves, everything that is beautiful Black.
It’s not that Smith’s reality doesn’t have its share of celebration, joy, and reclamation; it’s more that Don’t Call Us Dead provides a map for those who don’t always have access to spiritual communities and supportive kinship that Kamara may. In “a note on the body,” Smith guides the forsaken and godless with the words,
when prayer doesn’t work: dance, fly, fire
this is your hardest scen
when you think the whole sad thing might end
but you live oh, you live
everyday you wake you raise the dead
everything you do is a miracle
Smith has survived by finding the miracle in the Black boy with his unfloating feet, planted firmly on ground, holding a balloon. The same way James Baldwin reverses the N-word and spins it onto wyt people, throughout Don’t Call Us Dead, Smith fights to undo the stigma and portrayals on queer bodies, on Black bodies, on HIV+ bodies as dying, as dead and spins it on the United States. “You’re Dead, America,” declares Smith in his post-election poem. “Those brown folks who make / up the nation of my heart” are “realer than any god.”
While Smith may indulge in fantasy and myth—even dreaming of becoming a Flying African themself, as in “Dear White America”—their survival relies on building a soul tenacious enough to withstand the heat and explosiveness of White America. If that doesn’t work for you, follow Kamara’s song and prayer and help her build her New America. Reader, take from both these collections what you need to keep pushing. Take this string. Fly.