Page 154 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing
P. 154
Camille Norton
After • Word VOYAGE OF THE SABLE VENUS AND OTHER
POEMS: Robin Coste Lewis
Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) is an
extraordinarily accomplished first book of poetry. It won the National Book Award
for poetry in 2015 as part of a trifecta of prizes for African-American writers that
include Claudia Rankine, who won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award
in poetry for Citizen: An American Lyric, and Ta-Nehesi Coates, who received the
2015 National Book Award for non-fiction for Between the World and Me. It is no
longer possible for any thinking person to disregard the tension between literary
recognition in the U.S. and our contemporary political reality, between the
flowering of black literature and the diminishment of black lives. At a moment in
American culture when the theater of racial murder repeats as a feed of images
on our devices in real time, literature serves to teach us how the dark matter of
racial injustice belongs to the history of our planetary ecological crisis.
Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus confronts racism as an environmental,
spiritual, and psychic catastrophe for black women and all who are kin to them.
The “Venus” of the title poem stands for the representation of the black woman’s
body as it is traded, fetishized, described, fragmented, and realized in the
catalogs of Western art. The black woman may be a ladle, a pin, the back of a
mirror, a spoon—an artifact of thingness and of use dating from 38,000 BCE to
the present time. The poet appropriates the exact wording of archival
descriptions of objects, strips them of punctuation, and rearranges her findings
into collections that speak directly to the history of conquest and its eros of
commodification. What is an ebony goddess? Is she a forest that has been felled
and converted into art? What does she have to do with the bodies of women that
have been bought and sold? Why, to paraphrase Coste Lewis, did an emperor
