Imagine you’re a twelve year old girl who has lost her mother. How do you cope with the loss of your mother ? If you’re poor, there are no grief counselors you can go to, no real support system to help you deal with the loss. How do you howl your anger, your hurt and your grief ? She died of a drug overdose, but that’s not how you remember her, not how you want to remember her. Can words help you get past this horror ? Can a constellation of words, arranged just so allow you to heal ? Do you stand a chance to grow up to be a normal, healthy, adult ?
Liberty City is a poor, mostly black, drug ridden neighborhood in Miami, Florida, the scene of one of America’s worst racial riots after five white officers were acquitted for having beaten a black man to death. In the early morning hours of the final days of 1979, a black man, Arthur McDuffie, was involved in a high speed chase with the police. He fell off his motorcycle on a highway ramp. The officers who reached him, removed his helmet, beat his head with batons till he died, replaced his helmet and filed a report that he died in a motorcycle accident following a high speed chase. One of the cops even admitted to this on trial. Despite that, an all white jury acquitted all five officers.
In the movie, American Violet, a single black mother fights an arrest for drug use that she is not guilty of. The movie is based on a true story though the names are fictionalized. I learnt that 90-95% of people arrested for a crime agree to a plea bargain, not because they’re guilty, but because they’re scared into believing that if they don’t accept the plea bargain, they’ll be put away for eternity. As a single parent, your children are homeless if you’re incarcerated. Accepting a plea bargain of guilty with a suspended sentence means you can be out the same day. In the movie, the mother is told that she can go home in an hour and be with her kids if she pleads guilty. Neither the public defendant nor the prosecutor inform her that if she pleads guilty, she and her kids will no longer eligible for food stamps or Medicare, will be kicked out of the government housing project they live in, and her prospects of employment will be close to zero. The kick in the gut is that she’s arrested because her name is on the list of drug pushers for a personal reason, not because she sold drugs. In places like Texas in 2000, all you needed to be put away was one informant, no matter how compromised the informant. In such an environment, staying out of jail and making ends meet can be an impossible challenge, a challenge most of us maybe incapable of surmounting.
Back to the little twelve year old girl. How can she make sense of what happened ? She lives in a neighborhood where death is a constant visitor, where all her friends have seen someone close to them die. Patricia Smith, an African American poet, did a stint at Lillie. C. Evans school in Liberty City. The sixth graders wanted to know how poetry would help them in the real world. One of them, Nicole, wants Smith to help her remember her mother not as a drug addict, but as someone who sang to her as she braided her hair. Patricia Smith wrote a poem, Building Nicole’s Mama, for that little girl. Here is an excerpt:
I love you, Nicole says, Nicole wearing my face,
pimples peppering her nose, and she is as black
as angels are. Nicole’s braids clipped, their ends
kissed with match flame to seal them,
and can you teach me to write a poem about my mother?
I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead,
can you teach me to remember my mama?
A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole
has admitted that her mother is gone,
murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger
rifling through her blood, the virus pushing
her skeleton through for Nicole to see.
And now this child with rusty knees
and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream
and asks me for the words to build her mother again.
Replacing the voice.
Stitching on the lost flesh.
One Sunday evening this past September, I heard this on the radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge”. I was mesmerized by Patricia Smith’s reading of the poem, especially after explaining the story behind it. Since that day, they have refused to be dislodged from my mind.
My first encounter with poems was in school where they took a special place of hatred. In the provincial schools in middling towns of India that I studied in, the power, the beauty, the magic of the words was not taught. Poems were one more thing to memorize, though the memorization was harder because we had to reproduce the exact sequence of words. Poems were vomit, something you regurgitated, undigested, on papers in exam halls.
Even in such a system, the power of words found their way to immortality in my mind. To this day, I remember this fragment from Shelley’s “To A Skylark” :
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Why that phrase remained, I don’t remember. Had I laughed especially hard at someone’s fall that day ? If you scan my brain, I’m confident that you can see those lines. Robert Frost said: “The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound – that he will never get over it.”
In the same radio program, the host of the show interviews Jay Parini, the author of “Why Poetry Matters”. Jay Parini says that great poems burn a hole in the page and a hole in the mind. Many poems have burned holes in my mind since Shelley’s first did.
But still, poetry was highbrow, for cultured, well educated, middle class people, I thought. What possible effect could it have on the lives of people like Nicole ? Patricia Smith changed my mind. Smith concludes the poem, Building Nicole’s Mama with:
So poets,
as we pick up our pens,
as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones–
remember Nicole.
She knows that we are here now,
and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.
And she is waiting.
And she
is
waiting.
And she waits.
Listen to the whole show. It’s an hour well spent.
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