Page 155 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

feel the need to have a black woman’s body engraved into his buttons? And who

collects those buttons? Coste Lewis’s answer can be found in her list of the

hundreds of museums and museum catalogs that comprise the final “poem” in

the Venus sequence. Because museums reify what our cultures prize, and

because all prizes are part of the traffic of Capital, it appears that the black

woman’s body is integral to the movement of both Capital and beauty. This is a

hard insight to bear.

Such an insight can be produced only by a writer who has heated her project at a

slow burn. Coste Lewis, who is in her early 50’s, completed a graduate degree in

Sanskrit at Harvard, where she studied the epic in its most ancient form. She has

also studied comparative literature, poetics, and art and is completing her Ph.D.

in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC. Remarkably, she continues to suffer the

effects of traumatic brain injury. In an interview with Hilton Als, she describes

how her brain injury forced her to dramatically slow down her writing, so much so

that she spent a year relearning the alphabet: (http://www.wnyc.org/story/robin-

coste-lewis-turns-tragedy-triumph/). When her neurologist told her that she could

only write one line a day, Coste Lewis honed those single lines with care. In a

sense, the injury made her a poet. Her slow brain allowed her to decipher the

representations of black women in art. The wound, in other words, ushered her

into an archive that would forever alter her as an artist.

Other poems in the book chronicle voyages as complicated as those of the

“Sable Venus”. In “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari,” Coste Lewis recalls her

journey as a tourist in India. She has come to find a temple at the top of a

mountain where, according to the myth, the charred body of the goddess Parvati

had been dropped by the god Shiva. But the road is blocked by a throng of black

water buffalo stalled around a female buffalo who is giving birth to a dead calf.

The frantic mother buffalo is held in place with ropes by men. To an outsider, her

confinement within the ropes may appear to be an arbitrary act of human

domination. It is not. “She must turn around and see/what has happened to her,