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PORTSIDE CULTURE

REVIEW: WHITE TERROR; BLACK TRAUMA: RESISTANCE POEMS ABOUT BLACK
HISTORY  
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Billy Middleton
March 21, 2024
Louisiana Literature [[link removed]]

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_ One of the recurring themes of the collection: the ways in which
the scars caused by slavery and other forms of racial violence in
America linger, influencing and echoing future events within a
chronology of traumas. _

White Terror; Black Trauma: Resistance Poems about Black History,
Third World Press

 

Philip C. Kolin has published extensively in Black history and
literature, especially the surreal plays of Adrienne Kennedy (he
published the first book on her canon) and Suzanne-Lori Parks that
expose the horror of racism in America from the slave ships to Jim
Crow discrimination. He has also published several collections of
poetry dealing with racism in America, most notably Emmett Till in
Different States and Delta Tears, both of which might well form a
trilogy with his new and powerful book of resistance poems, White
Terror, Black Trauma, published by Third World Press, the oldest
independent press in America devoted to Black thought and the arts.

White Terror; Black Trauma: Resistance Poems about Black History
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By Philip C. Kolin
Third World Press; 72 pages
October 28, 2023
Paperback:  $19.95
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0883784270
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0883784273

The poems in this collection are arranged chronologically, from the
arrival of the first enslaved Africans in "Jamestown, birthplace / of
a nation, blackened by our moans," in the opening poem, "1619" (1), to
the contemporary horrors that have befallen victims including George
Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, both of whom are also commemorated within
this collection.

Kolin also honors the memories of those who fought against racism in
America, such as the freedman Denmark Vesey, who led an 1822 slave
rebellion "... against what his own white-given name / condemned him
to-being owned by another..." (3). Each poem in the collection carries
a helpful headnote identifying key individuals, places, and times. For
instance, the preamble to "Denmark Vesey" clarifies that Vesey "was a
member of the AME Mother Emanuel Church where Dylann Roof murdered so
many parishioners in 2015" (3). In addition to providing context, this
headnote reveals one of the recurring themes of the collection: the
ways in which the scars caused by slavery and other forms of racial
violence in America linger, influencing and echoing future events
within a chronology of traumas. Similarly, "1619" allows its enslaved
narrators to peer forward through time to decry the fact that their

        ...legacy [is] hardly acknowledged
        even when Queen Elizabeth II came
        to celebrate the three hundred and fiftieth
        anniversary of this settlement. (1)

In lines such as these, Kolin engages in one of the most valuable and
necessary tasks of resistance poetry: to reveal the struggles of men
and women whose voices have been overlooked or buried in some cases
intentionally by history.

As Kolin moves through America's Civil War era, he focuses on examples
of Black heroism. In poems such as "A Black Woman Called Moses" and
"Ain't I a Woman," Kolin highlights the work of abolitionists Harriet
Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and the poem "Dred is Still not Free"
recounts the struggles of Dred Scott, who was declared "Once a slave,
always a slave" by "Chief Injustice" Roger Taney. Kolin sees the story
of Dred Scott as the preamble to a Civil War "that continued for over
150 years-/Jim Crow was a part of Dred's legacy" (8). In poems such as
"Remember Fort Pillow," he paints in powerful and vivid verse the
less- studied sacrifice of Black soldiers such as the Colored Light
Infantry:

        They wore Union blue, all 300 souls of the
        Colored Light Infantry stationed at Fort Pillow on
        a bluff that overlooks the Mississippi where it
        snakes around a bend and flows down to
        Memphis.

Ditches, trenches, bunkers and parapets could not protect them from

        rebel snipers and artillerymen, Some 2,500
        strong, who stormed the Fort in savage fury.
        Bedford Forrest's marauders took no Black
        prisoners.

They saw only slaves who had fled the Stars and Bars And massacred

        them, even when they tried to surrender Or escape,
        hiding in cuts and hollows, or running
        Down to the river. Their blood turned the Mississippi
red.

        Eyes and bowels ripped open, brains scattered, their
bodies
        Burnt to embers, a warning to those who chose to wear
Union
        blue rather than chains. No comfort, no soldiers'
rights. They
        say their ghosts still haunt this section of the river
        Wearing campaign medals bright shining as the sun.
        (10)

From here, Kolin continues into the painful decades of Reconstruction
and Jim Crow, a time of lynchings and bloodshed. Here, Kolin
exemplifies the important role resistance poetry plays in revealing
the trauma wrought by injustice. "L is for Louisiana" and "Knots"
describe, respectively, an 1886 lynching in Shreveport, Louisiana, and
a 1902 lynching in Bolivar County, Mississippi. "Triple Lynched" tells
the tragic story of Mary Turner, who

...was only 20, a baby in her womb for 8 months, when a crazed white

        mob from Lowndes County taught
        her a lesson for defending her
        husband on a false murder charge...
        (17)

Kolin also explores a series of 1919 race riots, including the
"Massacre at Elaine"; the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in
Oklahoma ("Kristallnacht in Tulsa"); the destruction of the Black town
of Rosewood, Florida in 1923 (“A Town Called Rosewood"); the 1931
sham trial of nine Black teenagers

in Alabama convicted by an all-white jury of raping two white women
("Scottsboro Justice"); and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which
occurred over four decades from 1932 to 1972 ("Tuskegee's Bad Blood").
Of particular note here is the poem "America's Largest Black Morgue."
In haunting verse, this poem pays homage to the countless Black bodies
that have been consigned to rivers over the three centuries of
America's history:

The river craves Black bodies- plunging them into liquid darkness.

        While river ravens and cormorants
        hunger to be pallbearers of the
        air,

America's largest Black morgue is the river bottom.

Shifting mud an icon for flesh, Black bodies constantly

        changing

        even after death. Skeletons
        amputated by foul tides and
        paddlewheelers.

        Fish flap inside and then outside
        Klan-burned cars while gar glide in

        and out of refrigerator coffins.
        Tin roofs search for bombed houses.

Old Black men in muddy frockcoats and neckties made from

        lynching rope

        surface on moonless nights,
        congregating on
        dissolving

        levees

        proclaiming—
        "There is no more deep to call.”
        (29)

he last third of the collection reveals that stories of white terror
and Black trauma remain all too common in the present day. Here, Kolin
recounts numerous stories, almost all from the past two decades, of
police violence against Black men and women. "The Hoodie" examines the
killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Two years
later, "I Can't Breathe" became a rallying cry after the killing of
Eric Garner by police officer Daniel Pantaleo on Staten Island. "The
Ferguson Riots" examines the yearlong protests following the shooting
of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014.
"Palm Trees Didn't Grow that Year in Cleveland" tells the story of
12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot by a cop while holding a toy gun.
The murder of Ahmaud Arbery is the subject of "2.23," and the brutal
killing of George Floyd, which sparked off a summer of fiery protests
in 2020, is the focus of "Golgotha Outside Cups." The final poem in
the collection, "What Did I Do," captures the killing of Tyre Nichols,
who was brutalized by a special unit of cops called the Scorpions.
These stories reveal another important purpose of resistance poetry.
When the institutions of the nation itself are complicit in the
violence, the role of the resistance poet is to ensure that the crimes
of the powerful do not remain hidden.

The penultimate poem in the collection, "Emmitt Till on America's
Streets Today," revisits one of Kolin's frequent subjects, casting the
fourteen-year-old Till, who was brutally murdered while visiting
family in Mississippi, as a synecdochic representative of the
countless Black Americans killed throughout our nation's bloody
history:

        Emmett is buried in so many
        memories both living and deceased, all

        devoted to enshrining his suffering in a
        history that continues on American streets.

Mamie cradles her son weighed down by all that white lie

        testimony given by
        Sheriff Strider
        and the deputized
        fury
        of Money,
        Mississippi
        still loose on America's streets.

        Emmett has become
        the patron saint
        of all those Black bodies
        shot apart
        in routine traffic stops.
        He sobs breathlessly
        for all those driving while Black.
        (70)

Though Till's brutal murder happened almost seventy years ago, it
could be mistaken for another of the present-day stories of violent
injustice recounted in the poems preceding and following it. Thus,
again, Kolin reveals the uncomfortable ways in which the stories in
America's chronology of Black trauma echo and, if allowed to be
forgotten, repeat themselves.

While no poetry collection can fully catalog the entire history of
wrongs levied against Black Americans, White Terror, Black Trauma
offers a chilling and emotional exploration of that history's
trajectory, from the first slaves to arrive in the Colonies to the
most recent brutalities. In these resistance poems of witness, readers
can see how their various subjects create a roadmap of the nation's
racial scars, remnants of the harms done to Black Americans by a
country that has too often made itself complicit in their suffering.

_[BILLY MIDDLETON [[link removed]]
teaches first-year writing, fiction writing, and film studies at
Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.  His
scholarly and creative work has also appeared in CRAFT Literary, J
Journal, and The Southern Quarterly, among other places.]_

* Poetry
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* Racism
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* slavery
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* U.S. Slavery
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* African Americans
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* racial inequality
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* resistance
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* freedom struggle
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* racial violence
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* Emmett Till
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* U.S. history
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