…the tale of how we suffer
…delight
…triumph is never new
it always must be heard
…it’s the only light we got in all this darkness
–-James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
out where hunger lives
in lines that jump other lines,
that swing over the edges
of the scale
at the risk of ruin
Baldwin’s life-saving lines
bear witness that one can leave the shore
swim in the deep water
He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing
—he had been there, and he knew
language touches other language
what I know of drowning
I learned in my mother’s womb
in the haze of cigarette smoke
in the indifference of fathers
in the coldness of the classroom
in the IV drip and radiation table
the indignity of hospital gowns
in the necessity and impossibility of being a jew
what I know of deep water
I learned from poetry
where wind moves slowly
where you know that it is not
reason that makes us happy
or unhappy
the bird sings
and music swings
but music can be played while bodies
pile into the belly of ships
left to cook in their own shit
while the captain on deck
sings the deep red hues
of a sunset cut across the white feathers
of a gull he thinks
the birds’ fire fangled feathers dangle down he
watches the ropes that tie wrist to wrist
recall the braids from his lover’s hair
without a thought of the deep groan
below of the womb carrying
its stillborns
its unborns
its undrowned
to think
of Melville composing letters to Hawthorne
who he felt understood his loneliness,
his chariot out of the depths
as he worked the whiteness of the whale
from the belly of song
the appalling whiteness of being
the relentless witness of being
earth
water
alone
with whales
signifyin
testifyin
if we would only listen
Baldwin’s notes escape
from below the decks
from the ocean’s floor
from the shame of it all
if we would only listen
not many people do
hear it, he says—that terrible triumph
as it hits the air
calling us from deep water
with love
with love
still
how there can still be love
Notes:
This poem was originally inspired by Metta Sama’s poem “& on the fifth day God created” from her collection Swing at Your Own Risk (Kelsey Street Press). Reading that poem I heard James Baldwin’s voice ringing out through Sonny’s Blues and was confronted with my own history, forced into the suffering and complicity of my ancestry. I was sent spiraling back into how I was shaped by the whiteness of the whale, sobered by Sama’s observation that the white body can squat “in the belly of hell safe & sound/from all sorrow except of his own I reckon.” I’ve learned to live with the traumas as “just the way things are”—the history of my ancestors murdered, humiliated, beaten, raped in pogroms. Between the lines is the story of my grandfather stowing away on a ship to escape the Cossacks and conscription, his brothers perishing in the first world war. The bright swastikas painted on the doors of my elementary school, the overwhelming and deafening reality of the Shoah, deep in my DNA. The knowing, as a Jew, you are the reviled through centuries, any success only further evidence of your corrupt, deceptive nature. I cannot see a boxcar without linking it to Auschwitz. Confronted with Metta Sama’s poem and in the face of what she terms the continued slaughter /manic genocide of “brown people/seeking justice forsaking God to return to the goodness/of Genesis” I have to marvel that “there can still be love/goodness.” Among other things, what I take away from Sama’s poem is that the ability to luxuriate in a private life, contemplate the whale from a distance, is its own kind of violence.
About the Author
Andrea Strudensky teaches literature and writing at Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec.
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