In an extended sequence in Charles Burnett’s Black neorealist film Killer of Sheep (1978), shot in Watts, South L.A., two men struggle to wrestle a bulky used car engine down the stairs of an apartment and haul it home. One of them can’t be bothered to load it properly onto their truck, so, after all their effort and money, the engine falls out the second that the truck begins to move. The engine’s untimely demise is witnessed by the driver’s daughter sitting between them, who has pressed her face to the back window, lipstick smeared over her face as if a sad clown. As Scott Joplin’s “Solace” plays on the soundtrack, this single shot transforms the downbeat scene into slapstick. The camera ends the sequence with her wry point of view, just as earlier, wearing a dog mask, she peers in on a conversation between her father and his friend about suicide and the church, between the world of boys outside playing at war, jumping between building rooftops, doing handstands, counting, whiling away time, in reverie, in play.
It’s the girl in the dog mask, and other children like her, that capture Jordan’s attention in his orchestral fifth book of poetry, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again. It’s their joy and their capacity to dream, too often foreclosed by anti-Blackness and by state violence, that binds together these remarkable poems. In a poem about Tamir Rice, for example, Jordan notes that “the body’s shadow / had much to say, / but no one in earshot / understood its language… his prowess to indulge in play , / just one of his many gifts, / which scared onlookers.” In response, Jordan tips the sentence which holds Rice’s dream into motion, as it builds and crests across stanzas:
Play has a language which Rice’s murderers cannot understand, but also which readers may miss, too; it weaves across sorrow and death, but is never defined by those terms. These states of imagination are often interlaced with boredom or depression; they often even result from them. But they are a vital capacity central to Jordan’s project of reimagining their (and our) lives. While images of Black death are indelible and ever-present, the literary scholar Kevin Quashie has asked us to instead attend to Black aliveness, a project of worldmaking in which being and relation (and not their negation) are explored in their myriad of forms: “blackness,” Quashie writes in Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, “exists in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness” (1).
Consider, for example, Jordan’s use of the “window” form on the three primary figures of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Here, a matrix of four squares spell out a character’s qualities but also suggest, in the last square, the opacity of what is unknowable (and, accordingly, what is the most alive). In “A Window into Caliban,” the squares read
| Known to Others/Known to Caliban | Not Known to Others/Known to Caliban |
| Known to Others/Not Known to Caliban | Not Known to Others/Not Known to Caliban |
It’s in the lower right panel that we find “a Blackness so deeply committed to its hue that light cannot escape its pull.” In “A Window into Sycorax,” this form of being occurs “in dreams / she has yet to discern” and in even in the “the bewilderment / of hope” that is forgotten “once experience consumes her.” There’s an almost supernatural sense of an aliveness that exceeds the ability of knowledge to capture it. Yet it is thoroughly absent from the white imagination of African Americans—an imagination that, even in its liberal, “sympathetic” forms, can only imagine Black death or, at best, Black resistance and rebellion. Still, this unknown center, this asterisk, is the terrain of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, as when in one of his trademark “definition” poems, Jordan reminds us that Sandra Bland played trombone. Must we see ourselves only in the deaths of others? No, we see them, more keenly, in their music, in their aliveness.
Thus we can understand why an homage to Malick Sidibé’s photographs of teenage life in Bamako, Mali in the 1960s is placed nearly in the center of the book. Sidibé (1936-2016) captured teenagers tempted by then-forbidden Western music and clothing, in states of dance and intimacy. In Jordan’s update, a tailor plays a role of Puck, able to transform one body into another, to clothe and to disguise, to reveal and to withhold. And, like photography, Jordan invents a novel way of using the sestina for speed—both (as he relates) as a way of writing quickly to fit his collaboration with filmmaker Cauleen Smith, but also as a way of capturing a scene quickly, as Sidibe did with his camera, of people in motion. There they are, on the dancefloor, in gestures and expressions too fleeting for a slower form of portraiture. Jordan riffs a deft response: one dancer’s sestet leads to another’s sestet, each character perhaps a stranger but now sharing common elements, woven together into the fabric of the dancefloor. A modified villanelle, with the end-word “art” becoming as insistent as a beat in music, reminds us that villanelles were not just sung or read but danced, moving in a circle, coming together.
Jordan’s central characters here are Rokia and her lover, Shango. Rokia, four years old in one poem, is in the next seventeen: “In spring,” she says,
the perennials stretching
through the earth toward the sky;
I realize at that moment, 7 AM on the clock,
that I must do the same.
The poems here are ekphrastic, but with a twist, as befits Jordan’s own experience working with both word and image. One poem about Rokia longing for a dress from a Vogue photoshoot from 1967 is paired next to another image—not the poem’s “source,” as it were, but a still from Cauleen Smith’s film. This couple doubles the Black imagination of this image, and suggests how ekphrasis need not simply be a process of moving image to language but also image to image, and language to image.
I admire the way this collection builds through these couples: image next to image, call next to response, prose next to verse next to the (fictional) interview in which Killer of Sheep and Titus Andronicus sit side by side. It adds up to a sophisticated argument about visibility, and we can see this argument seeded in one of its more daring moves, in which we are asked to inhabit the figure of Prospero from The Tempest. Prospero stood for the white colonialist in Aimé Césaire’s play A Tempest, but Jordan’s verse imbues him with added dimension. In his portraits, we learn that he is formed through his visibility to others—and, in turn, this forms how he perceives children: “I raised my son in my likeness, / so he would never go unseen”; “When my world looks at me, I feel, feel in my body, like the first blossom on a tree in my backyard”: an extraordinary moment of tenderness that is nevertheless borne of the gaze, of likeness, of reproducing oneself.
Here is Jordan’s insight: whiteness (by which I do not mean white people, but the larger structure of power to which white people—and, at times, people of color—are called to continually enact) works through transparency and reciprocity. I think of Junichiro Tanizaki’s point, in his 1933 In Praise of Shadows, that the Westerner must both metaphorically and physically live inside an atmosphere of constant illumination, in contrast to the Japanese sensibility of existing in shadow and partial visibility. In this dissenting spirit, Blackness allows for difference within its visibility. As Jordan writes about “coal-black” Aaron the Moor in Titus and elsewhere in the collection, “His body’s hue holds many colors.”
Thus When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again takes up D.L. Hughley (and Cornelius Eady’s, and Claudia Rankine’s) lesson that “the most dangerous place for a Black man to live is in a white man’s imagination”, and goes beyond it, exploring the reciprocal danger of a Black man “visiting the white imagination” in figures such as Prospero. In Jordan’s hands, even Aaron the Moor, despite all his awful stereotyping as a blood-thirsty villain, becomes “begrimed with beauty”, turned towards the present. Aaron’s eventual fate—execution—is already decided, and yet, as Jordan puts it in the book’s endnotes: “he copes, he maneuvers, and he even finds ways to reverse his fortune for a while.”
Among certain academic and left-minded circles, it is fashionable to valorize Herman Melville’s character Bartleby, who stubbornly refuses to work, even to move. T-shirts and tote bags emblazoned with “I would prefer not to,” Bartleby’s signature line, suggest that one may simply refuse to comply with the dictates of capitalism. But in invoking the spirit of the blues, in creating figures such as Aaron and Higginbotham, the professor of Shakespeare that is the subject of the fictitious interview, Jordan argues for another way forward. To “do everything in one’s power”; to cope, to maneuver, and to struggle, even if—especially if—the ending is foreclosed.
Jordan closes the collection with a summons: “How to Celebrate a Revolution.” It is a response to the disbelief and even numbness to death that we see on TV or on social media. (To invoke philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, that numbness is the logic of cynical reason: we know about anti-Blackness, we know the world is ending… but “knowing” is a way of keeping things the same.) In a refrain of the Tamir Rice poem I quoted above, Jordan writes:
Imagine, before the show of your life fills
With static snow on screen, you look outside
And decide—not see but decide—there is snow
On the front lawn; you jump
On the white dance floor,
There is an impatience with witness here, with poems that merely see, that document the act of violence and then wait for some response: acts that, self-satisfied, close the book on revolution rather than impel it forward. Instead, the poem ends with nothing less than the fact that revolution is already immanent, its energies already burning through the present. Earlier in the book, Jordan’s Sycorax commands: “Go to the tree, to the home, to the street corner, / and spread these words, to bring—tossing wreaths, / spinning incantations…”. As her words suggest, the spell that we must cast is the permission to accept the unknown within ourselves, and to take joy in that capacity for aliveness, even when everything seems to point in the other direction.
Tung-Hui Hu is the author of five books, most recently Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection (2022), A Prehistory of the Cloud (2015), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (2013). A former Rome Prize and NEA fellow in literature, he is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan.
