One of the projects I have set myself for this tenth year after the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington DC is to read all the books of poems I own that were published in 2001. I think it will be interesting to see what some of the poets I care about were writing in the years prior to 9/11. I was hoping to get started in January, but a whole lot of things intervened, not least the fact that I was assigned at the last minute an introductory literature course that I was in no way prepared to teach. I have not taught this course in a couple of years and the book I used to use, the Barnstone’s Literatures of the Middle East has a suggested retail price of $100.60, way more than I am comfortable asking my students to spend–and that’s for the paperback edition! It’s a wonderful book, and I loved using it, but that price is at least a 100% increase over what my students paid the last time I assigned it. I also hate using the literature anthologies published by textbook companies. Not only do they too cost more than I feel I can ethically ask my students, who are not literature majors, to spend, but even if the prices of those texts were more reasonable, there is just no way in a single semester to cover enough of the material they contain to justify asking students to lug one around for a whole semester.
So I decided I would do something I have been thinking about for a long time: building an intro to literature course around actual books, not just anthologized poems and short stories. Given my time frame–I was assigned the course so close to the start of classes that I had to teach the first few meetings without a syllabus, schedule of readings or writing assignments–I decided to use books I’ve already read and so, to kill two birds with one stone, I chose two books of poetry from my 2001 collection and two novels. The first of these books of poetry is Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination, published by G. P. Putnam. Brutal Imagination contains two sequences, “Brutal Imagination,” which is a series of poems spoken in the voice of the Black carjacker invented by Susan Smith in 1994 to explain the disappearance of her two children, whom she in fact had murdered by running the car in which they were sleeping into a lake so they would drown, and “Running Man,” which also deals with race in America.
I chose Brutal Imagination because I liked the idea of reading with my students poetry that was written explicitly for the purpose of making sense of issues that they themselves deal with–and, of course, that I deal with too–if not on a daily basis, then certainly at various times throughout our lives, and I have been pleasantly surprised by how well my choice has worked out. The class I am talking about meets from 9:25-10:45 PM, which means that most of the people taking it are a little older and a little more mature than the students I have in my day classes. The group is racially mixed, though mostly white, and there are more men than women. The first thing I did was assign the Time magazine article I linked to above, so that we would all have the same set of facts in our heads as we discussed what Susan Smith had done. Conversation focused at first, of course, on how a mother could bring herself to murder her own children, but I moved us very quickly to a discussion of how she’d tried to cover up what she’d done–accusing an imaginary Black man of carjacking her and driving off with her kids–and what it might say about the cultural imagination of the United States not just that people were willing to believe her so easily, but that the entire nation, it seemed, mobilized in the effort to comfort her and help her get her kids back.
I expected this discussion to be full of tension. Indeed, I am sure that if I’d tried to teach this book, say, seven years ago, there would have been a great deal of tension: defensiveness on the part of at least some white students who felt themselves accused by the nature of the topic; anger on the part of those Black students who saw in the white students’ position a dismissal or trivialization of what they, as Black men and women, had lived through. What took place instead, however, was one of the most honest and respectful discussions about race and racism in the United States that I have ever witnessed in a college classroom. Granted, the students in this class may be an exceptional bunch, but I couldn’t help thinking as I went home that night that something has changed.
In terms of teaching, I am going to start this unit the way I always start talking about poetry, by getting students to grapple with the fact that poems have speakers and that these speakers, even when they speak in the first person, are fictional characters. (My hope is that this will set us up to discuss characterization more fully when we start reading the novels I’ve chosen.) Eady’s speaker, to whom I will refer from now on as The Black Man, poses some interesting challenges in this regard. Right in the very first poem, for example, he switches without comment and with a good deal of irony from the first to the third person:
How I Got Born
Though it’s common belief
That Susan Smith willed me alive
At the moment
Her babies sank into the lakeWhen called, I come.
My job is to get things done.
I am piecemeal.
I make my living by taking things.So now a mother needs my clothed
In hand-me-downs
And a knit cap.Whatever.
We arrive, bereaved
On a stranger’s step.
Baby, they weep,
Poor child.
The first part of the poem is, if not familiar, at least straightforward. The Black Man describes himself as the man that white people summon–even if, like Susan Smith, only in our imaginations–to do certain kinds of dirty work. Suddenly, though, in the last stanza, a “we” enters the poem, in lines referring to the moment when Susan Smith knocks on someone’s door to report the supposed carjacking. Because he is a product of her imagination, therefore, he is there with her; and so, in a deeply ironic twist, the sympathy the stranger expresses is sympathy for The Black Man as well. After all, the way in which Smith hijacked his image is analogous, at least in a metaphorical sense, to the carjacking she has both used him to create and created him to commit. Indeed, not a few of the poems that follow take as their plot line this carjacking that never happened; and Eady weaves The Black Man’s consciousness of his dual nature–he is who he is as the image of the Black man in America, but he is also part of Susan Smith–throughout.
In “Who Am I?”, for example, he has the boys recognize “something familiar” in him:
Though my skin and sex are different, maybe
It’s the way I drive
Or occasionally glance back
With concern
In “The Lake,” Eady has The Black Man switch back and forth between first and third person:
When called, I come.
My job
Is to get things
Done.Our hands grip the wheel
As I steer toward
The lake.The children and I
Have been driving
For days.
There is a great deal more that can be said about Brutal Imagination, but for now I am focused on this question of the speaker’s voice and how it illuminates the ways in which the image of The Black Man that Susan Smith conjured is an image we all have in us; and I am very curious to find out what my students make of it. We begin dealing with it tonight.
Cross posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in the Poetry.
