The Dark Lady
Nighttime rubs against windows
Like the same black cat
Who slinked out of language
Punched black-&-blue by fists
Nighttime rubs against windows
Like the same black cat
Who slinked out of language
Punched black-&-blue by fists
From the Archive
Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic
In both Europe and the Americas, art was important to African slaves because it offered them the possibility of what I will call a socially transcendental existence; it could be marshaled into everyday life as a condition of survival against the laws that mapped out the place of the black as being outside the framework of modernity…Just as the aesthetic could become a key index in the violence of modernity, it could also provide the subjects of this cruelty with the hallowed place where utopian dreams could be nurtured and secured.
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In both Europe and the Americas, art was important to African slaves because it offered them the possibility of what I will call a socially transcendental existence; it could be marshaled into everyday life as a condition of survival against the laws that mapped out the place of the black as being outside the framework of modernity…Just as the aesthetic could become a key index in the violence of modernity, it could also provide the subjects of this cruelty with the hallowed place where utopian dreams could be nurtured and secured.
From the Diary of Sally Hemings
“White waves—a bitter dream—my mother’s mother in the lower deck—wet and cold in the blue-black night.
Dahomey child, betrothed when she was young, before she knew of white men or the sea.
A thin veil of fog. Her family brings a farmer, a boy not yet a man, to marry with the business of the home. Each dawn she climbs the palm tree and touches wine with her hands. A feast prepared. The gods must have a hand in this! A young goat sacrificed, okra, oranges, a basket of yams laid at her feet. She stands with old friends in new finery, her buba and iro an odd-colored blue, hair in beads, piled to the sky, tapping the palm wine from the palm tree.
Kidnapped before the roast meat was cold, snatched away to America; she was a stranger to the sea. White waves in the blue-black sea. Now a voyage of a different sort. Maria won’t go unless I come along. White waves in the blue-black sea till we land in port.”
From the Diary of Sally Hemings Read More »
“White waves—a bitter dream—my mother’s mother in the lower deck—wet and cold in the blue-black night.
Dahomey child, betrothed when she was young, before she knew of white men or the sea.
A thin veil of fog. Her family brings a farmer, a boy not yet a man, to marry with the business of the home. Each dawn she climbs the palm tree and touches wine with her hands. A feast prepared. The gods must have a hand in this! A young goat sacrificed, okra, oranges, a basket of yams laid at her feet. She stands with old friends in new finery, her buba and iro an odd-colored blue, hair in beads, piled to the sky, tapping the palm wine from the palm tree.
Kidnapped before the roast meat was cold, snatched away to America; she was a stranger to the sea. White waves in the blue-black sea. Now a voyage of a different sort. Maria won’t go unless I come along. White waves in the blue-black sea till we land in port.”
I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense
O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god/if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean
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By Danez Smith
O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god/if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean
The Generosity of Arpeggios and Ravens
20 years ago MQR published the first of two special issues on the Secret Spaces of Childhood. The following poem, from Thylias Moss, is available via our archives. The Generosity of Arpeggios and Ravens Please note: The following is an arpeggio. It was possible to leap from world to world using the sturdiest balloons I’d
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By Thylias Moss
20 years ago MQR published the first of two special issues on the Secret Spaces of Childhood. The following poem, from Thylias Moss, is available via our archives. The Generosity of Arpeggios and Ravens Please note: The following is an arpeggio. It was possible to leap from world to world using the sturdiest balloons I’d
