Abstract
While a growing body of work focuses on research in the form of poetry, the author instead uses poetry to examine not only her research topic and academia but also her own motives for research. Based on an exploration of narrative in her historiographical study of the Georgia Writer’s Project Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, Kelly’s poetic interrogation begins with her personal connection to the Flying African tales, then moves into the ways her own life informs her self-identification as a researcher and scholar. Finally, she turns her gaze on the ultimate gazer—academia.
The presentation of this work in an academic journal seeks to trouble rather than soothe, agitate rather than comfort. It calls for an unwavering, unabashed accountability: if we academicians truly want to explore, truly want to find the answers to our questions, we must first examine ourselves.
I: Origin
We are to write as if we are from nowhere.
But that is a lie.
Reflexivity: Georgetown, 1998
The streets were lined with live oaks.
He pointed out the empty, haunted houses,
the old auctioneer’s house
the warehouses where they held them, underground.
I walked the streets,
feeling connected. Feeling artificial.
Trying to unknow what I’ll always know:
Sacred Disconnect is my Legacy.
I am here and nowhere,
blessedly free from earth-ties,
the next stop in this liberation evolution –
a whispered floating, ghost-like.
I can disappear without trace or regret.
I can fit in anywhere,
be anyone,
for you.
My mothers and grandmothers wanted it this way, maybe.
Maybe this was their solution:
to break free from the place where hands
were dyed permanent purple,
where women’s names could be Titty,
then to break free from tenements and projects,
from rats and bedbugs, from whiskey-soaked sorrow,
from kites with razor blades for tails.
So, full circle:
Artificial liberation evolution:
Indigo-dyed hands,
breasts that name their owner,
a girl-mind that allows for none of this.
All the same:
I can be anyone,
anything
for you.
Researcher/Outsider: Cousin Jackie, 1998
My great aunt and female cousins from the area advised me
never to be in a house alone with him.
Outside was okay.
It just didn’t look right, they told me.
“But he’s my cousin,” I thought, but didn’t say.
They were all well aware that he was.
Mosquitoes dive-bombed us on the plantation.
I wondered how they could have lived there, even when free,
on that island.
“They flew from here,” he said, pointing.
“Flew back to Africa. Ever heard that befo’?”
I shook my head no.
The mosquitoes weren’t as bad further inland.
He, jovial, talked about the tastiness of turtle eggs and slurping them.
I, pleasant, maintained three feet of distance.
I thought about the women of my family,
strolling these dusty, sun-dappled roads,
in fear of their men,
in fear for their reputations.
Second-Generation American
Because who am I, really?
Nothing – no one.
No real kin, tradition, home language to speak of.
My grandmother waded in it,
got to decide what to remember, what to forget.
My mother lived in its wake, splashed around,
but birthed me on dry land.
I wander the dunes with phantom gills,
thirsty for liquids I can’t imagine.
(I want to end here, because I like short poems –
ending things with a punch or kick or some other
violent metaphor,
but the wandering calls me back to tell its story.)
Identity
What happens when you come from nowhere?
No one has heard of your hometown,
and it’s nothing special to speak of:
a place of in between-ness;
like you, it’s just a stop on the road to more important places.
Still, there is something to be said for having a history no one knows:
People will always mistake your acting for authenticity.
Not knowing yourself leaves ample time to know everything else.
And, as time passes, you
– intelligent, authentic –
will figure out that you were never really worth knowing, anyway.
II: Abstract
This is what I feel about what I do.
(We want even our feelings to be formal –
categorized, controlled –
which, I think, is the greatest of sins,
a laughable delusion.)
Research
Now, I just skim,
knowing there’s no connection,
knowing that I’m nothing more than a reader
trying to find herself in a book.
A+
“Your paper was kinda awesome,” he said.
“Where’d you learn to write like that?”
I appreciate the compliments, but they don’t matter, really.
I’m not any closer to finding out who they were –
those enslaved,
registered,
unnamed on my wall.
These pretty words are my bird dance,
my futilely calling them closer,
my hoping you won’t notice
what’s eluding me.
The Flying African
There’s a peace growing inside me.
I already know the end product:
None of our striving matters much.
Or at all.
What counts is whether you can be in the right place at the right time –
even though you’ve figured out that there’s no such thing as either.
Whether you can appear,
be that glimmer in the photo that your great grand niece seven times over has taken of a field
where you had existed once –
before you figured out there’s no such thing.
Ten years later,
(they, unlike you, still believe in years)
her lover will pick up the photo in its dusty frame,
say, “You see this light right here? That’s a spirit. It was trying to show you it was there, with you.”
Your distant girlchild studies the picture silently,
wanting to believe, already familiar with barren hope.
Notices a faint outline – hers – reflected in the car window that separated her from your existing-field.
Looks at the light – you –
and sees a flash of the camera instead,
a blur of sunlight.
She remembers looking out on that quiet field, on that swamp,
and wondering what it was like to live there.
You see she can’t know you right now.
But you want to tell her –
it’s easy to love a place,
it’s easy to hate a place,
before you figure out there’s no such thing.
Dervish
Chicken bones.
Fire.
Blood.
Mine.
I knew how to read, once.
And I can still count.
I had even taught the older ones when I was
still a small child.
Mud and dirt.
Dust and mud.
Circles holy, profane.
Around the Kaaba, around the neck.
If I could just
Just
figure this out
this world
this New World
is madness.
blood
birth
glass
mine
Coins on the eyes for safe journey.
glass on the grave for protection
after the fact
so many graves
Stories that no one believes.
We knew your Christ wasn’t God centuries ago.
I don’t even know when to pray anymore.
The sun is different here.
Mean. Angry.
So is the earth. Like it wants revenge.
Felled trees
Dancing bodies
Dancing hands
Broken necks
Hermit crabs
Legs spread
Mine.
The greatest sorrow is that even an evil
place can become your home, before long.
III: Know-It-Alls
We tend to be more confused than most, but much too late.
We want to explain sand swiftly pulled from beneath our toes,
the tidal wave at our backs.
Our own deaths surprise us:
surely the ability to describe indicates the ability to live forever.
Surely.
White Ignorance, the Construction of Blackness, and African Indigenous Knowledge Systems: A Summary
so
there’s a mix of things that I am
and things that I am not
it all comes back
though
nevertheless
comes down
if you will
however
to
my Blackness
and my Africanness
or
my Africanness
and my Blackness
and there ain’t no gettin around it
no matter what you say Whiteperson
no matter what you need to think to keep your world from blasting apart
Academia
A playground.
Some just got up from naptime,
relieved that, today, there were no accidents,
terrified the others will discover their nighttime secrets.
Some, too big for their age,
hopped up on hormone-injected chicken and the lies of the dairy industry,
feel their girth, but don’t understand it.
They angrily pummel the smaller, more modest ones.
Rout out those that prefer hiding to seeking.
Lob kickballs at the juice-sipping daydreamers,
wishing they could daydream, too.
Academia II
My kids ask me why I’m still writing.
They want me not to have any more work to do.
To be free.
How do I tell them that I have been bamboozled?
You’re never told that if you spend all your time doing well in school,
school becomes your only future.
I have no other skills to speak of.
I can’t start a fire or grow my own food or ride a horse.
But I can write a mean essay.
When the revolution comes,
I’ll be the first one pushed off a cliff.
So I’d better get while the gettin’s good,
while people are still willing to pretend that thinking is important,
while writing and pontificating can provide my children the freedom to be revolution-ready.
Maybe, in the New Order, they’ll be relaxing around a fire they built,
at the compound they cut out of the forest,
and get nostalgic about the Old Days of Obsolescence and Waste
and their mother that was brilliant and useless.
Bibliography
I read lots of stuff.
See?
Some of it was helpful.
Some of it wasn’t, for now –
but probably will be, later.
(I hope my list is good enough.
I hope I’m good enough.)
