Page 156 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

or she will go mad,” Coste Lewis writes. The poem concludes with lines that are

emblematic of the book’s motive:

I have to go back

to that wet black thing

dead in the road. I have to turn around.

I must put my face in it.

For those of us attentive to the relationship between the human and “nature,” the

poem reminds us that there is no easy resolution between supposed binaries.

There is, in fact, a difficult, painful, affiliation between “the human” and “the

natural.” The buffalo, who is an aspect of the Goddess to the men who restrain

her, will go crazy if she cannot “see” the dead child. By holding her back, the men

ensure that she will remain a healthy animal. The poem comprehends religion’s

symbolic structure, and the way the symbolic mediates our human suffering. It

does this while identifying with the animal. It also points to the political necessity

of seeing what has happened to us in the story of what we must see and why. I

notice that in this poem Coste Lewis is the educated and privileged American

“scholar” among the Hindu herdsmen. And yet the boundaries between inside

and outside, self and other, human and animal blur and dissolve here, as if we

were a dream, all of us implicated, taking on the parts.

I began this meditation by thinking about why racism and environmental crisis are

part of the same web. The black woman’s body is figured in Capital; Capital is a

story of bodies exchanged for gain; gain is the figure beneath the blight in which

we live. Back in America, in an outer L.A. wasting into suburban blight, Coste

Lewis describes a homeland where “The Farmers were lost/and hating it. We

were lost/and couldn’t care less” (“Frame”). This poem in particular brings

together the history of racism and the history of environmental depredation. It

was not so long ago that it was against the law for African Americans to buy

property “except in certain codes: South Central, Compton, Watts,” places of