Radical Elegies

White Violence, Patriarchy, and Necropoetics

Eleanor Perry

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350236080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Scholarship has traditionally characterized elegy as a Eurocentric tradition – a genealogy spanning from ancient Greek pastoral poems via the "English elegy" to English and Anglo-American Modernist contemporary poets.
Perry examines how these genealogical constructions operate as a means of framing which guides interpretation. This book argues that they reflect a necropoetics – a system of principles, precepts and techniques which serve to establish and maintain ideas about whose lives are worthy of being mourned publicly and whose losses matter.
Examining elegies that challenge questions of whose deaths may be grieved; elegies which articulate the various ways in which certain lives are made precarious and disposable; and elegies which interrogate colonial violence, structures of white power, militarized forms of policing, prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes, Perry explores possibilities for radical new ways of understanding elegy beyond established genealogical frames.
This study retheorizes some basic terms of analysis of contemporary US poetry and poetics, critical race and ethnic studies, racial capitalism and contemporary theories of comparative and relational racialization.

1

Ornate absences and rhetorical acts: The scholarly reception of elegies by Black and African American women poets

In relation to the conspicuous absences of Black women’s writing from literary scholarship, Toni Morrison asks ‘[w]hat intellectual feats had to be performed,’ in order to achieve them (1988: 136). ‘[C]ertain absences,’ she argues, ‘are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose’ (1988: 136). To achieve such absences, she suggests, certain rhetorical actions and critical positions are necessary. This same question may be levelled at genealogies of elegy in relation to the absence of critical attention paid to work by women of colour. As we have seen in the Introduction, such little attention as is paid is, in almost all instances, attention to elegies by Black and African American women writers. While Krupat covers elegiac work by Indigenous American women (including Linda Hogan and Jane Johnson Schoolcraft) (2012); and Hammond explores elegy in the context of Arabic women’s poetry (2010), elegies by Asian, African, West Asian and North African, Caribbean, Latinx and Chicanx poets are so significantly marginalized and excluded from genealogical approaches that their work is often not mentioned at all. This renders investigation into any rhetorical devices employed as a means of maintaining that exclusion extremely difficult, since there are few or no examples to examine. It is for this reason that this chapter takes as its focus elegiac work by Black and African American women writers. This is not, however, to suggest that the marginalization and exclusion of work by women elegists of colour within genealogical approaches is limited to dichotomous Black and white racial constructions. The aim of this chapter is to highlight the rhetorical means – the ‘intellectual feats,’ to quote Morrison – that have been performed in order to maintain the conspicuous absence of work by Black women in genealogical approaches to elegy (1988: 136). In doing so, however, it should not be overlooked that there are means by which these and other absences are maintained that remain invisible, in particular the decision not to include any reference to work by women of colour whatsoever, as in the examples of Shaw (1994); Spargo (2005); Kennedy (2007); Sacks (1987); Smith (1977); and Kay (1990). In addition to the ‘intellectual feats’ explored within this chapter, we must be equally attentive to blanket omissions like these and the structural biases they demonstrate (Morrison 1988: 136).

Black elegies, white elegies: Prescriptive gestures

Ramazani (1994) makes frequent references to Black women’s work, though some of these references warrant close analysis. The title of Ramazani’s book – Poetry of Mourning – implies that the contents will provide an overview of poetries that express or embody the practice or experience of mourning. The subtitle – The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney – suggests a chronology of twentieth-century elegists beginning with Thomas Hardy’s elegies in Poems of 1912-13 and ending with those of Seamus Heaney from the 1960s onwards. In other words, based on the title alone, a reader might expect broad and inclusive coverage of elegies from that time period. However, Poetry of Mourning is not as broad and inclusive as the book’s title implies. Alongside a chapter on Langston Hughes and a section on Michael S. Harper, and in addition to Hardy and Heaney, the book examines Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden and Sylvia Plath, along with seven other white poets organized under the heading ‘American Family Elegy’.

Just as Ramazani’s framing of his text as a genealogy implies a survey of the elegiac tradition, many other elegy scholarship texts make explicit claims about their broad scope. For instance, Sacks’s book (1987) is described in its blurb as ‘an interpretative study of a genre,’ while Kennedy’s Elegy (2007) is described as ‘an overview of the history of elegy’. It is only in Zeiger’s text, Beyond Consolation (1997) that Black women’s elegy is given substantial critical space in her engagement with Lorde’s breast cancer poems. However, as Morrison points out, ‘invisible things are not necessarily “not-there”’ (1988: 136). In other words, this broad lack of acknowledgement within elegy discourse does not signify that Black women have not written elegies.

While Ramazani does – importantly – dedicate critical space to Black women’s elegy, this largely takes place within a chapter which examines the work of Langston Hughes.¹ Ramazani describes Hughes’s work as bringing into elegiac poetry a ‘scorned world’ of Black poverty, in which ‘death is no abstract possibility but an omnipresent and everyday reality,’ and suggests that in doing so, he ‘mak[es] it easier for a poet like Gwendolyn Brooks to write extensively about the death-haunted lives of the black urban poor’ (1994: 157).

This description of poor Black lives as a ‘scorned world’ presents Black poverty as something contemptible or despised: the word ‘scorned’ – which denotes something mocked, disdained, or rejected – is a derisive choice of wording for the form of marginalization he is indicating (Ramazani 1994: 157). Further, by describing these lives as a ‘world,’ he presents them as self-contained and separate from – rather than a condition of – society, which subtly operates as an othering gesture that does not acknowledge that Black urban poverty is a product of systemic racial inequality within capitalist society. Importantly, his assertion implicitly makes Brooks’s work contingent upon the work of Hughes. We might read this as signposting Hughes’s influence on poets who came after him (including Brooks); or that Hughes paved the way for other Black poets to be published. But it is nonetheless a genealogical gesture. The description of her poetry as ‘extensively about the death-haunted lives of the black urban poor,’ reduces her nuanced and complex work to a singular facet that can be traced easily and exclusively back to Hughes (Ramazani 1994: 157). We might also note that Ramazani refers to ‘a poet like Gwendolyn Brooks,’ rather than to Brooks specifically (1994: 157; emphasis mine). By implying that a poet like Brooks was able to write because Hughes did so first presents a literary lineage which elides issues of gender that existed both within and outside of the literary milieu within which Brooks was writing.

Ramazani’s broader discussion of Hughes’s work appears to distinguish the work of Black elegists as intrinsically different from those written by white elegists. His chapter on Hughes begins with the suggestion that the phrase ‘African-American elegy’ might ‘seem to be a contradiction in terms or a redundancy’: a ‘contradiction’ because elegy has been ‘defined as a European form, inherited from the Alexandrian Greeks, and passed on via Spenser and Milton to the English-speaking whites of subsequent periods’; and a ‘redundancy’ because ‘African-American poems’ have often been categorized as ‘Sorrow Songs’ (1994: 135). Ramazani’s underlying point appears to be that Black writers have written poems that span a range of different forms and emotional registers, but his framing and phrasing exemplifies the way in which genealogical approaches to elegy enable the marginalization and exclusion of Black writing. The definition of elegy as a ‘European form’ is presented as unquestionable fact, even though Ramazani notes that Black writing is often understood as elegiac in nature.

Having stated that Black poets have created work that explores a wide range of forms and subjects, he goes on to say that ‘they have mastered the elegy,’ later referring to the work of Hughes and other Black poets as a ‘large achievement’ (Ramazani 1994: 135). His use of the word ‘master’ here implies an act of taking ownership of something that does not already belong to a person; or the acquiring of a skillset that one does not initially possess. Further, while the word ‘master’ has carried the meaning of a craftsman or skilled person since the late twelfth century, the word cannot be extricated entirely from its legacy as a sixteenth-century legal term for a slave owner. Thus, the word ‘master’ carries white supremacist implications, albeit perhaps deeply embedded. The depiction of this supposed mastery of the elegy as a ‘large achievement’ implies that the skillset acquirement is one that does not come naturally; that it required considerable effort to attain (Ramazani 1994: 135). It reflects the way in which a genealogical framework understands elegy as a literary form which integrally belongs to white writers; and moreover, that for Black writers to engage with it requires some kind of exceptional or extraordinary ability.

This implication is reinforced by later assertions that ‘African-American elegists have remade the Eurocentric genre in their own image,’ and that Black elegies are a ‘revisionary appropriation’ (Ramazani 1994: 135–6; emphases mine). Ramazani’s discussion of Black elegiac work thus depends on an understanding of the elegiac mode as, first-and-foremost, Eurocentric; the notion of ‘revisionary appropriation’ implies a primary Eurocentric ownership of elegy as something that has been taken and modified (1994: 135–6). This is also evident in the claim that the ‘large achievement’ of the so-called mastery of elegy by Black writers is ‘diminished when placed in this genealogy [i.e. Poetry of Mourning] or in comparable genealogies of such European genres of sonnet and epic’ (Ramazani 1994: 135). This seems to suggest that the accomplishment reflected by Black elegies is lessened or devalued when held in comparison with the ‘English elegy’ and its European legacies. It is only in a ‘dual context of African-American and European forms of poetic lament’ that Hughes’s work can be ‘properly appreciated,’ according to Ramazani (1994: 135). This reflects and reinforces the idea that elegy is a mode that intrinsically belongs to Europeans, and to those of European descent. In other words, it demonstrates the way in which genealogical conceptions of elegy inevitably lead to equivocations about who can and cannot be included within it.

Later in the text, Ramazani discusses elegies that were written by Black poets following the death of Malcolm X, and in doing so claims that some of these poems – those by Amiri Baraka and Margaret Walker in particular – were written ‘in a collective, eulogistic mode less functional for contemporary white Americans’ (1994: 174). This assertion suggests explicitly that they are not as useful to white readers as they are to Black readers. His reasoning is that they constitute a ‘representative response, articulating “our” loss on behalf of other members of “our” community’ (1994: 174). This relies upon an assumption that elegy might have a particular function that can only be experienced within racial categories. Specifically, it implies that white readers have nothing to gain from engaging with the loss of Malcolm X through perspectives articulated by Black writers. The use of quotation marks around the words ‘our’ serves to emphasize a sense of separateness and exclusion; Ramazani appears to imply that Baraka and Walker’s poems are ‘less functional’ because they are not explicitly addressed to non-Black readers (1994: 174).

As Sonia Sanchez recounts in an interview with Eisa Davis and Lucille Clifton, the perception of Malcolm X as a figure of no interest beyond the Black community is a revisionist one: ‘[p]eople don’t understand that whites, blacks, everybody loved Malcolm. [. . .] they stood up and clapped and stamped their feet for this man’ (Davis 2002: 1055). We might also argue – to borrow from Michael Awkward’s examination of minority studies – that elegies like those for Malcolm X, ‘represent sophisticated traditions of thought that can effectively illuminate the political, cultural, and economic history of non-European and/or non-white male descendants in America’ (1995: 80). In other words, white readers have plenty to gain from reading articulations of loss outside of those written by white writers or those addressed to white readers, particularly when these articulations specifically address events that took place within an important political and cultural context. We might thus read Ramazani’s assertion as potentially reinforcing what bell hooks refers to as ‘assumptions that cultural productions by black people can only have “authentic” significance and meaning for a black audience’ (1990: 110).

This argument leads Ramazani to the conclusion that the ‘subjective ambivalence,’ and ‘anti-eulogistic poetics of white American poets’ (such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and John Berryman), is ‘in part, ethnically based’; a claim that implies a distinction between a white elegiac aesthetic and a Black one (1994: 174). This raises a number of problematic issues. To begin with, if there are arguments to be made for such a distinction, they would certainly require significant further analysis to substantiate them. To simply demarcate the two aesthetics as ‘eulogistic,’ on the one hand, and ‘anti-eulogistic’ on the other, is a considerable oversimplification. For instance, if – as it would seem – Ramazani uses the elegies for Malcolm X as representative of all Black elegies, he consequently overlooks that many Black elegists have written work that incorporates ‘subjective ambivalence’; while many white elegists have adopted a eulogistic – and indeed a collective – mode (1994: 174).

Further, such a demarcation draws comparisons with the complex and contentious notion of a Black Aesthetic. Though many theorists have drawn upon this notion – particularly in relation to poetry written during the Black Power and Black Arts Movements – many Black writers themselves have articulated ambivalence towards the term. Gwendolyn Brooks, for instance, has stated that she was ‘so sick and tired of hearing about the “Black aesthetic,”’ and further that she was, ‘glad of [its] loss,’ after the 1960s (Tate 1985: 45). Similarly, Nikki Giovanni asserted, when asked if there is a Black Aesthetic: ‘I am not interested in defining it. I don’t trust people who do,’ and further that ‘[t]hat kind of prescription cuts off the question,’ of what Black culture has achieved, ‘by defining parameters’ (Tate 1985: 63). Ramazani’s distinction seems to perform a similarly prescriptive gesture by implying that some Black elegies might be of little use for white readers; and that they might be understood as separate from or subsidiary to a Eurocentric tradition that can equally – according to these demarcations – be reduced to one particular poetic mode. We might understand this delineative gesture, as with any delineation based on racial categories, as constituting what Kutzinski refers to as a ‘policing [of] canonical borders,’ based on ‘problematic assumptions about how authors and texts ought to profess their national, political, or ethnic identities’ (1992: 552). By gesturing towards a distinction between poetic modes of Black and white elegy, Ramazani’s points maintain a binary that allows for the policing of the ways in which poets of different racial identities articulate grief through poetry. However, as Kutzinski points out – and as can be discerned in the ambivalent assertions of Brooks and Giovanni above – writers themselves frequently regard these kinds of ‘critical and cultural systems of classification [. . .] with some measure of disdain’ (1992: 552). Simply put, writers do not always subscribe to the kind of literary policing that such demarcations enact and permit.

To be clear, in my analysis of Ramazani’s chapter here, I do not mean to imply that his text exhibits deliberate racial biases, but rather that a racial binary nonetheless underlies some of the statements made within it. In some ways the focus on Ramazani’s text in particular is unfair since, as I have outlined earlier, many elegy scholarship texts do not critically engage with Black women’s elegies – or indeed, Black elegists of any gender – at all.

Safe grief and dangerous grief

bell hooks addresses the issue of Black writers publishing within a hegemonically white industry. She argues that Black writing ‘is shaped by a market that reflects white supremacist values and concerns,’ and that Black writers trying to publish will usually encounter a ‘white hierarchy determining who will edit one’s work’ (1990: 18, 11). A similar assertion is made by Young, who argues that a ‘predominantly white publishing industry reflects and often reinforces the racial divide that has always defined American society’ (2010: 4). This context is integral to understanding the intellectual feats that are examined in this chapter, since it is the fundamental backdrop against which such feats take place.

Let us take, for example, the publishing context of Phillis Wheatley’s poems. Wheatley was forced to legally defend the authorship of her poetry in court. Her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was prefaced with paratextual material that verified her as its author, written by a number of Boston men of standing including the famous signatory John Hancock, the minister Charles Chauncy and the governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson. Her access to publication was therefore entirely mediated, controlled and facilitated by her wealthy white owners and their acquaintances. Wheatley was later unable to publish further work, despite making several proposals for a second volume. As Helen M. Burke has suggested, ‘[w]ithout the aid of her powerful friends in the white establishment, [. . .] Phillis Wheatley was indeed silent and silenced’ (1991: 40).

Gwendolyn Brooks’s publications provide another example. Having published with Harper & Row up until the late 1960s, her shift to small and independently run Black presses – Broadside and Third World – was unprecedented. James D. Sullivan suggests that it was a transferral not motivated by economic factors, but rather signifying a move away from a ‘mainstream-poetry-buying public,’ to a publisher that enabled her to write, publish and distribute her work ‘in a black context’ (2002: 557; 560). This implicitly presents Harper & Row as a white publishing context from which Brooks actively decided to break. Though her later poems published through Broadside and Third World have received academic attention, many readers outside of an academic context are – according to Young – only familiar with the (now HarperPerennial) Selected Poems which, he suggests, ‘remains the most widely available venue for casual readers of her work’ (2010: 103–4).

Young’s analysis of this book’s paratextual material is insightful, particularly in relation to the intellectual feats we are seeking to examine here. He cites an afterword by literary critic Hal Hager, which states that ‘there is nothing bitter or explicitly vengeful,’ about Brooks’s work (cited in Young 2010: 104). He also cites an excerpted essay by Harvey Curtis Webster, who claims that Brooks ‘is a very good poet [. . .] compared to other Negro poets or other women poets but to the best of modern poets, she ranks high [sic]’ (cited in Young 2010: 106). This excerpt continues, seeking to reassure readers that, though her poems explore explicitly racial subject matter – he lists Emmett Till, Little Rock and Dorie Miller, for instance – she nonetheless refuses ‘to let Negro-ness limit her humanity’ (cited in Young 2010: 106–7). As Young points out, Webster’s remarks not only ‘implicitly identif[y] the “best of modern poets” as white and male,’ but they also approach Brooks’s work entirely through ‘racialist discourse’ (2010: 107). Similarly, Hagar’s remark depends upon racist assumptions in its implication that, as a Black woman poet, she might be assumed to be bitter or explicitly vengeful.

Tellingly, Webster’s remarks have been abridged in more recent reprints of the anthology, though surprisingly not removed entirely. The 2006 version included on its back cover only the extracted phrase: ‘compared . . . to the best of modern poets, she ranks high,’ in which the ellipsis omits its overtly racist content (2006: n.p). We can discern similar discourse in another quote on the same 2006 cover, this time from Robert F. Kiernan that reads ‘[p]robably the finest black poet of the post-Harlem generation’ (2006: n.p). This quote explicitly limits the superlative quality of Brooks’s work to within a racial category of poets and qualifies its assertion with a conditional. In other words, for Kiernan, Brooks is not ‘the’ finest poet, but ‘probably’ the finest one ‘of the post-Harlem generation’. Moreover, given that the Harlem Renaissance – to which Kiernan’s ‘post-Harlem generation’ comment is referring – was a Black cultural and artistic movement, it is doubly strange that he chooses to further include the word ‘black’. This has the effect of gesturing towards her Blackness twice, both implicitly and explicitly, perhaps in order to be unequivocal – for the sake of white readers – in his classification of Brooks as a Black writer. His description of Brooks, not as the finest poet of the post-Harlem generation but ‘probably’ the finest ‘black’ one, implies the possibility that there are other, non-Black post-Harlem poets who are perhaps better. Thus, though Kiernan’s quote might seem – on the face of it – to constitute praise, its heavy reliance on racial discourse also serves to set the book apart from w...