Journal of Lesbian Studies
ISSN: 1089-4160 (Print) 1540-3548 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjls20
The Killer Will Remain Free: On Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness Kazim Ali To cite this article: Kazim Ali (2015) The Killer Will Remain Free: On Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:3, 379-383, DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2015.1028281 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.1028281
Published online: 15 Jun 2015.
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Date: 05 November 2015, At: 19:56
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:379–383, 2015 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1089-4160 print / 1540-3548 online DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2015.1028281
The Killer Will Remain Free: On Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness KAZIM ALI
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
Creative Writing and Comparative Literature, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, USA
Poet and scholar Kazim Ali reads Pat Parker’s Movement in Black intimately, one poet to another, uncovering the shadow-fact of the lives of most people of color: not only the anger that is somehow sublimated into every part of our lives but also the issue that carrying this feeling around has on our mental health itself—that “anger” and “madness” might have sources in one another. Ali concludes that Parker offers a brutal and clear-eyed and ultimately hopeful assessment of the conditions that were faced at the time, and even now, by communities of color. KEYWORDS Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Ferguson, Jonestown, mental health, Priscilla Ford Hands up. Don’t shoot. I can’t breathe. To be a dark body in America is dangerous at the moment, though it likely always has been. Can we agree on that for now? The double-consciousness Dubois once wrote about turns on its ear (or turns on the spike driven through an ear): to have an African-American body, a queer body, a female body, means you live an interior life but also the exterior one, the one on guard, the one in crisis. And it is the worst kind of lie to think that the welter of emotions—wariness, fear, anger, dread—that accompany survival in the tense world do not also affect the possibilities of the inner life. This was the poetic terrain wrestled with by so many of the powerful poetic forebears who brought into language their political considerations—in this tribe you have to include Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Pat Parker, Mari Evans, Lesley Reese, Sonia Sanchez, Cheryl Clarke, and Judy Grahn. There were other women, writing in more traditional modes perhaps, with voices considered more Address correspondence to Kazim Ali, Creative Writing and Comparative Literature, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. E-mail: [email protected] 379
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
380
K. Ali
traditionally “lyric” but who shared their political sensibilities—Jane Cooper, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Judith Johnson, Jean Valentine, and Olga Broumas are perhaps among them. With the notable exception of Rich, and to some extent Lorde, the mainstream publishing and academic establishment has been friendlier to members of the second group than the first. Sanchez’ work has achieved very recently some acknowledgment, but only her later work, not the earlier work more closely aligned with the Black Arts aesthetic. While reading deeply in the vein of this era of poetry, I found Pat Parker’s book called Jonestown and Other Madness. “Other Madness” rather than the more typical “and other poems” that might accompany a book comprised of one long title poem and other shorter poems? It seemed a powerful acknowledgement of the shadow-fact of the lives of most people of color: not only the anger that is somehow sublimated into every part of our lives but also the issue that carrying this feeling around has on our mental health itself—that “anger” and “madness” might have sources in one another. The heart or driving force of the book was not a pointless stewing about a present condition but a desire to recognize it and by doing so, question it and find solutions to it. In the foreword, Parker (1985) writes of the Jonestown massacre, “If 900 white people had gone to a country with a Black minister and ‘committed suicide,’ would we have accepted the answers we were given so easily” (p. 5)? Parker is not concerned too much with accounting for past injustices, in fact, but rather with trying to find a way forward with clarity and health. Of the “madness” of ignoring this condition, she writes, “It is frightening to me that we live with the madness, that we continue to move through our lives as if these—and more—were normal occurrences” (ibid). So we find that for some writers it is impossible to choose between the political and the personal. Not because, necessarily, the “personal is political” as is often said, but the reverse: the political—the way a black body is treated, or any body—actually has real lived impact on the human individual. Michael Brown’s body in the street, or Eric Garner’s or Tamir Rice’s, actually means something in the living tissue of a body of color anywhere. In her poem “Love Isn’t,” Pat Parker confesses to her lover who perhaps might wish she thought less about the political, “I wish I could be / the lover you want / come joyful / bear brightness / like summer sun // Instead / I come cloudy / bring pregnant women / with no money / bring angry comrades / with no shelter” (p. 9). There is no separation in Parker’s reality between caring for the individual and being concerned with larger issues of social justice. “I care for you,” she says to her lover, “I care for our world / if I stop / caring about one / it would be only / a matter of time / before I stop / loving / the other” (p. 10).
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness
381
Parker views such a practice—the examining of an interior landscape without also engaging in historical and material context—to be a form of madness. When Parker questions our responses to the deaths at Jonestown, she creates a critical confluence between our ability to either engage or disengage from issues of social injustice with the bodies that are victim of such injustice. The 900 black bodies at issue—the people who went to Jonestown and drank the cyanide-laced juice and died there—seem then to be irrelevant, less worthy of concern. Audre Lorde talks about anger at injustice as a genesis for creative expression when discussing the origins of her poem “Power.” As in recent news, a police officer had been acquitted in the shooting death of young black child. Lorde writes that when she heard of the news, “A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/audre-lorde). Her poem opens, “The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.” For Lorde, the poet must put everything at stake in order to move away from “rhetoric,” a political language of death, a language used to oppress and hold down others, so in the course of liberation from oppression, it is poetry that must be turned to. Later in the poem, Lorde warns, “But unless I learn to use / the difference between poetry and rhetoric / my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240144). Parker writes about the Atlanta child murders in her poem “Georgia, Georgia, Georgia on My Mind.” In it she imagines the responses of her white friends, hoping that it is not an organized project by the Klan or a Nazi group: “better to be quiet/and hope it is one insane fool” (p. 25) even while the police psychologist suggests that the killers are Black: “the kids wouldn’t trust / a white / and half the nation / prays he’s right” (p. 26). Parker posits instead that regardless of who the individual killer is, the problem is systemic: “My anger rises / I know who the killers are / and know the killer will go untried / see no court or judges / no jury of peers / the killers wear the suits of / businessmen / buy ghetto apartments / and overcharge the rent /. . . / the killers scream about / juvenile crime / and refuse to build childcare centers” (p. 27). In this way Parker links the individual instances of violence to a societal pathology and glumly suggests that, “Long after the murders of / Atlanta are solved / the killer will remain free” (p. 28). Lorde only refers metaphorically to her desire to drive her car into a wall. She is saved by the difference she delineates between “poetry”—a force of life—and “rhetoric.” By the poem’s end, she knows that if she did not choose poetry she would have corrupted herself into an act of violence. Pat Parker writes about such a woman who, rather than find expression,
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
382
K. Ali
succumbed to her anger or her madness—it was hard to say which. In Reno, Nevada, in 1980, Priscilla Ford drove her car off the road into a crowd, injuring twenty-three and killing six. Her lawyers entered an insanity plea and as Parker tells it in her poem “One Thanksgiving Day,” “she was crazy with anger / she was crazy with fear / she was crazy with defeat / she was crazy with isolation / no sane person kills / strangers with their cars” (p. 32). Although expert witnesses testified that she was suffering from a variety of mental illnesses, the judge and jury believed her competent and able to tell right from wrong and sentenced her to death. Parker goes on to say, “You cannot be insane / to be enraged is not insane / to be filled with hatred is not insane /. . . / it is your place in life” (p. 32) and ominously concludes, “The state of Nevada / has judged / / that it is / not crazy / for Black folks / to kill white folks / with their cars” (p. 34). It is in this condition that Pat Parker tries to make a life. It should be unsurprising then, that anger would play such a role in her perceptions and it is the giving vent to that anger, rather than suppressing that leads Parker to Lorde’s “poetry” rather than “rhetoric” and rage. Among the sometimes humorous targets of her frustrations are a child who steals her child’s toys and the child’s mother who does nothing about it, a lover who breaks up with Parker, or even well meaning friends who ask “have you written anything new” (p. 41)? In the end, in the longest poem of the book, “Jonestown,” Parker comes back to the racial difference around mental health. “White folks are crazy,” (p. 55) Parker’s community seems to say about the white man on TV who sky-dives, or who participates in physical stunts on the program “Sports Spectacular.” Similarly dismissed is a white man who shoots his family and then himself. And Parker remembers another childhood slogan she always heard, “Black folks do not commit suicide / Black folks do not / Black folks do not / Black folks do not commit suicide” (p. 56). Of course when she sees the news from Jonestown she remembers the old adage and wonders about her Uncle Dave, who supposedly hung himself in prison. Her friends worry about her because a woman named Patricia Parks, who died in Jonestown, is misnamed on the news as Patricia Parker. Parker thinks about her shadow self in the jungle, “I am here / not there / festering / . . . / Yet / I am there / walking with the souls / of Black folks” (p. 60). When she muses deeply on the pathology of hatred and dismissal that is felt in subtle and not-so-subtle ways on a daily basis by people of color, Parker slowly realizes, “the Black people / in Jonestown / did not commit suicide / they were murdered / they were murdered in / small southern towns / they were murdered in / big northern cities / . . . / they didn’t die at Jonestown / they went to Jonestown dead / convinced that America / and Americans / didn’t care” (p. 63–64).
Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness
383
In a book filled with murder, both symbolic and actual, and murderers, both as well, Pat Parker has offered a brutal and clear-eyed and ultimately hopeful assessment of the conditions that were faced at the time, and even now, by communities of color. It is poetry like this that offers us a chance to touch the rage and anger and even madness in our inner lives, in order to try to heal that unseen and unacknowledged trauma.
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
REFERENCES Audre Lorde Biography. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/audrelorde Lorde, A. (1978). “Power.” Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/ 240144 Parker, P. (1985). Jonestown and Other Madness. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.
CONTRIBUTOR Kazim Ali is the author of five books of poetry as well as several volumes of fiction and nonfiction and works in translation. His forthcoming books include a book of critical essays on poetry, Resident Alien: On Border Crossing and the Undocumented Divine, and a volume of poetry to be published in India, All One’s Blue: New and Selected Poems. His most recent volume of poetry in the United States is Sky Ward. He teaches in the Creative Writing and Comparative Literature programs at Oberlin College.
ISSN: 1089-4160 (Print) 1540-3548 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjls20
The Killer Will Remain Free: On Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness Kazim Ali To cite this article: Kazim Ali (2015) The Killer Will Remain Free: On Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:3, 379-383, DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2015.1028281 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.1028281
Published online: 15 Jun 2015.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 97
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wjls20 Download by: [University of Idaho]
Date: 05 November 2015, At: 19:56
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:379–383, 2015 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1089-4160 print / 1540-3548 online DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2015.1028281
The Killer Will Remain Free: On Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness KAZIM ALI
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
Creative Writing and Comparative Literature, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, USA
Poet and scholar Kazim Ali reads Pat Parker’s Movement in Black intimately, one poet to another, uncovering the shadow-fact of the lives of most people of color: not only the anger that is somehow sublimated into every part of our lives but also the issue that carrying this feeling around has on our mental health itself—that “anger” and “madness” might have sources in one another. Ali concludes that Parker offers a brutal and clear-eyed and ultimately hopeful assessment of the conditions that were faced at the time, and even now, by communities of color. KEYWORDS Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Ferguson, Jonestown, mental health, Priscilla Ford Hands up. Don’t shoot. I can’t breathe. To be a dark body in America is dangerous at the moment, though it likely always has been. Can we agree on that for now? The double-consciousness Dubois once wrote about turns on its ear (or turns on the spike driven through an ear): to have an African-American body, a queer body, a female body, means you live an interior life but also the exterior one, the one on guard, the one in crisis. And it is the worst kind of lie to think that the welter of emotions—wariness, fear, anger, dread—that accompany survival in the tense world do not also affect the possibilities of the inner life. This was the poetic terrain wrestled with by so many of the powerful poetic forebears who brought into language their political considerations—in this tribe you have to include Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Pat Parker, Mari Evans, Lesley Reese, Sonia Sanchez, Cheryl Clarke, and Judy Grahn. There were other women, writing in more traditional modes perhaps, with voices considered more Address correspondence to Kazim Ali, Creative Writing and Comparative Literature, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. E-mail: [email protected] 379
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
380
K. Ali
traditionally “lyric” but who shared their political sensibilities—Jane Cooper, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Judith Johnson, Jean Valentine, and Olga Broumas are perhaps among them. With the notable exception of Rich, and to some extent Lorde, the mainstream publishing and academic establishment has been friendlier to members of the second group than the first. Sanchez’ work has achieved very recently some acknowledgment, but only her later work, not the earlier work more closely aligned with the Black Arts aesthetic. While reading deeply in the vein of this era of poetry, I found Pat Parker’s book called Jonestown and Other Madness. “Other Madness” rather than the more typical “and other poems” that might accompany a book comprised of one long title poem and other shorter poems? It seemed a powerful acknowledgement of the shadow-fact of the lives of most people of color: not only the anger that is somehow sublimated into every part of our lives but also the issue that carrying this feeling around has on our mental health itself—that “anger” and “madness” might have sources in one another. The heart or driving force of the book was not a pointless stewing about a present condition but a desire to recognize it and by doing so, question it and find solutions to it. In the foreword, Parker (1985) writes of the Jonestown massacre, “If 900 white people had gone to a country with a Black minister and ‘committed suicide,’ would we have accepted the answers we were given so easily” (p. 5)? Parker is not concerned too much with accounting for past injustices, in fact, but rather with trying to find a way forward with clarity and health. Of the “madness” of ignoring this condition, she writes, “It is frightening to me that we live with the madness, that we continue to move through our lives as if these—and more—were normal occurrences” (ibid). So we find that for some writers it is impossible to choose between the political and the personal. Not because, necessarily, the “personal is political” as is often said, but the reverse: the political—the way a black body is treated, or any body—actually has real lived impact on the human individual. Michael Brown’s body in the street, or Eric Garner’s or Tamir Rice’s, actually means something in the living tissue of a body of color anywhere. In her poem “Love Isn’t,” Pat Parker confesses to her lover who perhaps might wish she thought less about the political, “I wish I could be / the lover you want / come joyful / bear brightness / like summer sun // Instead / I come cloudy / bring pregnant women / with no money / bring angry comrades / with no shelter” (p. 9). There is no separation in Parker’s reality between caring for the individual and being concerned with larger issues of social justice. “I care for you,” she says to her lover, “I care for our world / if I stop / caring about one / it would be only / a matter of time / before I stop / loving / the other” (p. 10).
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness
381
Parker views such a practice—the examining of an interior landscape without also engaging in historical and material context—to be a form of madness. When Parker questions our responses to the deaths at Jonestown, she creates a critical confluence between our ability to either engage or disengage from issues of social injustice with the bodies that are victim of such injustice. The 900 black bodies at issue—the people who went to Jonestown and drank the cyanide-laced juice and died there—seem then to be irrelevant, less worthy of concern. Audre Lorde talks about anger at injustice as a genesis for creative expression when discussing the origins of her poem “Power.” As in recent news, a police officer had been acquitted in the shooting death of young black child. Lorde writes that when she heard of the news, “A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/audre-lorde). Her poem opens, “The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.” For Lorde, the poet must put everything at stake in order to move away from “rhetoric,” a political language of death, a language used to oppress and hold down others, so in the course of liberation from oppression, it is poetry that must be turned to. Later in the poem, Lorde warns, “But unless I learn to use / the difference between poetry and rhetoric / my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240144). Parker writes about the Atlanta child murders in her poem “Georgia, Georgia, Georgia on My Mind.” In it she imagines the responses of her white friends, hoping that it is not an organized project by the Klan or a Nazi group: “better to be quiet/and hope it is one insane fool” (p. 25) even while the police psychologist suggests that the killers are Black: “the kids wouldn’t trust / a white / and half the nation / prays he’s right” (p. 26). Parker posits instead that regardless of who the individual killer is, the problem is systemic: “My anger rises / I know who the killers are / and know the killer will go untried / see no court or judges / no jury of peers / the killers wear the suits of / businessmen / buy ghetto apartments / and overcharge the rent /. . . / the killers scream about / juvenile crime / and refuse to build childcare centers” (p. 27). In this way Parker links the individual instances of violence to a societal pathology and glumly suggests that, “Long after the murders of / Atlanta are solved / the killer will remain free” (p. 28). Lorde only refers metaphorically to her desire to drive her car into a wall. She is saved by the difference she delineates between “poetry”—a force of life—and “rhetoric.” By the poem’s end, she knows that if she did not choose poetry she would have corrupted herself into an act of violence. Pat Parker writes about such a woman who, rather than find expression,
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
382
K. Ali
succumbed to her anger or her madness—it was hard to say which. In Reno, Nevada, in 1980, Priscilla Ford drove her car off the road into a crowd, injuring twenty-three and killing six. Her lawyers entered an insanity plea and as Parker tells it in her poem “One Thanksgiving Day,” “she was crazy with anger / she was crazy with fear / she was crazy with defeat / she was crazy with isolation / no sane person kills / strangers with their cars” (p. 32). Although expert witnesses testified that she was suffering from a variety of mental illnesses, the judge and jury believed her competent and able to tell right from wrong and sentenced her to death. Parker goes on to say, “You cannot be insane / to be enraged is not insane / to be filled with hatred is not insane /. . . / it is your place in life” (p. 32) and ominously concludes, “The state of Nevada / has judged / / that it is / not crazy / for Black folks / to kill white folks / with their cars” (p. 34). It is in this condition that Pat Parker tries to make a life. It should be unsurprising then, that anger would play such a role in her perceptions and it is the giving vent to that anger, rather than suppressing that leads Parker to Lorde’s “poetry” rather than “rhetoric” and rage. Among the sometimes humorous targets of her frustrations are a child who steals her child’s toys and the child’s mother who does nothing about it, a lover who breaks up with Parker, or even well meaning friends who ask “have you written anything new” (p. 41)? In the end, in the longest poem of the book, “Jonestown,” Parker comes back to the racial difference around mental health. “White folks are crazy,” (p. 55) Parker’s community seems to say about the white man on TV who sky-dives, or who participates in physical stunts on the program “Sports Spectacular.” Similarly dismissed is a white man who shoots his family and then himself. And Parker remembers another childhood slogan she always heard, “Black folks do not commit suicide / Black folks do not / Black folks do not / Black folks do not commit suicide” (p. 56). Of course when she sees the news from Jonestown she remembers the old adage and wonders about her Uncle Dave, who supposedly hung himself in prison. Her friends worry about her because a woman named Patricia Parks, who died in Jonestown, is misnamed on the news as Patricia Parker. Parker thinks about her shadow self in the jungle, “I am here / not there / festering / . . . / Yet / I am there / walking with the souls / of Black folks” (p. 60). When she muses deeply on the pathology of hatred and dismissal that is felt in subtle and not-so-subtle ways on a daily basis by people of color, Parker slowly realizes, “the Black people / in Jonestown / did not commit suicide / they were murdered / they were murdered in / small southern towns / they were murdered in / big northern cities / . . . / they didn’t die at Jonestown / they went to Jonestown dead / convinced that America / and Americans / didn’t care” (p. 63–64).
Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness
383
In a book filled with murder, both symbolic and actual, and murderers, both as well, Pat Parker has offered a brutal and clear-eyed and ultimately hopeful assessment of the conditions that were faced at the time, and even now, by communities of color. It is poetry like this that offers us a chance to touch the rage and anger and even madness in our inner lives, in order to try to heal that unseen and unacknowledged trauma.
Downloaded by [University of Idaho] at 19:56 05 November 2015
REFERENCES Audre Lorde Biography. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/audrelorde Lorde, A. (1978). “Power.” Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/ 240144 Parker, P. (1985). Jonestown and Other Madness. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.
CONTRIBUTOR Kazim Ali is the author of five books of poetry as well as several volumes of fiction and nonfiction and works in translation. His forthcoming books include a book of critical essays on poetry, Resident Alien: On Border Crossing and the Undocumented Divine, and a volume of poetry to be published in India, All One’s Blue: New and Selected Poems. His most recent volume of poetry in the United States is Sky Ward. He teaches in the Creative Writing and Comparative Literature programs at Oberlin College.
