in her voice, consonants caught
in her throat, her tongue
lonely for anything Chippewa
& African, emerging Edmonia
Lewis.
Taboo isn't brutally shocking. It's more in the vein of a historian who delights in the naughty bits -- and it's both salacious and somewhat difficult. Some information can be guessed at but to fully appreciate "Hagar's Daughter" it's best to know that Edmonia Lewis was a Black/Indian sculptress born in the 1840s, originally with an Indian name. When Komunyakaa writes, "a fireman found// The Death of Cleopatra/ among cranes & clamshell buckets," he is referring to Lewis's masterpiece, mysteriously lost until the 1970s, when it was rescued from a storage yard by a fire inspector.
The tercets are tightly woven, accomplished, and add up to more than historical snapshots. Often they present stories of violent and sexual encounters that result in new technologies, folklore and argot. A prime example is the opening poem "Lingo": "Herodotus, woven into his story,/ tells how the Phoenicians lent/ war fleets to Greece & Egypt,// how a ghost-driven flotilla/ eased like a salmon up birth water/ & sailed the Red Sea,/ hoping to circumnavigate Africa/ around the Cape of Good Hope. . . ." The poem goes on to chart other cross-cultural encounters and their influence on language, even in ways that may reflect a "harmless" phrase's roots in calamity: "white list," (a list of v.i.p.'s) "black sheep," (a bad person) "white tie" (a formal affair) "black market" (the market for stolen goods). The ghosts of the dead return in these phrases. Komunyakaa provides no annotations. Readers should keep an African American heritage dictionary handy when digesting the many literary allusions and references to African history, jazz history and the black presence in antiquity.
Rita Dove, with her precise, singing lines, eliminates the impure, the wrong notes, the clutter and the waste to reach straight to the heart of experiences so that emotion rings true. Komunyakaa, even when he tells "dirty" stories, redresses the whitewashed record and brings the truth to light. Their new volumes call to mind Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman -- the private gaze and the civic drum, purifying language, purifying history. •
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and critic living in Charleston, S.C.
