POETRY IN REVIEW
2018; Wiley; Volume: 106; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2018.0001
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
Resumo1 6 3 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W C H R I S T O P H E R S P A I D E Don’t Call Us Dead – the second full-length collection by the twenty-nine-year-old American poet Danez Smith – could stop you short, several times over, with its title alone. Don’t call us dead: that imperative is at once a reclamation (don’t you call us dead; that’s for us to say), a rebuke (don’t just call us dead, do something ), and a revision (don’t call us dead: we are, or were, much more). In ‘‘summer, somewhere,’’ a monumental opening sequence that imagines an afterlife for murdered African American boys, Smith’s title becomes a resurrection spell: somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown as rye play the dozens & ball, jump in the air & stay there. boys become new moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise -blue water to fly, at least tide, at least spit back a father or two. . . . D o n ’ t C a l l U s D e a d , by Danez Smith (Graywolf Press, 96 pp., $16 paper) 1 6 4 S P A I D E Y here, there’s no language for o≈cer or law, no color to call white. if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call us dead, call us alive someplace better. we say our own names when we pray. we go out for sweets & come back. Surely when black boys are killed prematurely, murdered without warning or consequence, they head ‘‘somewhere,’’ but where? Smith starts simply, hopefully, with a summer ‘‘sun’’ – but already imagination and reality start bartering. Does afterlife retain childhood ’s vibrant ‘‘play,’’ or stall in midair stasis? Do these boys reach lunar transcendence, or are they forced to ‘‘beg’’ for every single preserved life? If this afterlife can be delimited only vaguely (‘‘somewhere,’’ ‘‘someplace better’’), its basic demands are all too easy to articulate: these boys pray for themselves, self-defensive and self-dignifying; after an outing for childish ‘‘sweets,’’ they can ‘‘come back’’ safely, without needing to pray they’ll ‘‘come back’’ alive. Smith (whose preferred personal pronouns are they, them, and their) pledges their exceptional voice to communities that have been denied all exceptions: to black boys oppressed by police and demonized in public, to queer and genderqueer youth, to today’s HIV-positive men barely assuaged to hear, of their diagnosis, that ‘‘it’s not a death sentence anymore.’’ The pronoun dominating ‘‘summer, somewhere’’ is the posthumous, collective ‘‘we’’ of those revived black boys: together they ‘‘play,’’ rename and reimagine themselves, and ‘‘unfuneral’’ newcomers – that is, dig up the newly dead and welcome them home: ‘‘we say, congrats, you’re a boy again! / we give him a durag, a bowl, a second chance.’’ Their dreamt-up Neverland inverts (and is sadly unthinkable without) the violent reality they’ve left behind: ‘‘paradise is a world where everything / is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.’’ Eventually, the dire paradox of this predicament dawns on these boys – ‘‘the old world // keeps choking them. our new one / can’t stop spitting them out’’ – but as early as the sequence’s urgent overture, we hear that direness in the grain of Smith’s versatile, volatile voice. Apparently informal, lowercase and slangily intimate, Smith’s lines P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 6 5 R can tauten into alliterative clatters, percussive pummels of stresses; legato one moment, they might crash headlong into monolithic images or break so sharply they give whiplash: ‘‘don’t fret, we don’t die. they can’t kill / the boy on your shirt again.’’ ‘‘summer, somewhere’’ unspools across twenty pages, its terse couplets grouped, generally, into sixteen-line sections, like sonnets barred from neat endings; every page but the last ends on a double slash, //, implying continuity across rupture. In between collectively spoken sections situated in the boys’ purgatorial ‘‘not earth / not heaven,’’ Smith inserts two-page interludes, printed in italics, that revisit earth and admit the individual voices of mourners and mothers, brothers and...
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