Dependent

Your life depends
On the string of balloon
Slipping through your small black hands
Dotted with carnival ice cream

Giving way to a shirt flowered
First sign of breasts; age 10 betrayed you
Sixth grade girls, a bathroom, the barkers
Fresh hell of admissions
I was a new creature
The joy of recess kickball, field days
Lung-burning victory; the boys couldn’t catch me.
Their parents soured candy masks
Their lies tightening in their children’s throats
The first time every brown or black kid
Hears the truth; the taste of hatred
You know this channel; this program is not news.

Crackling inside myself, interrupted
Split in two. The thin metal line of a smile
Stretched across my face
Hopscotch chalk now rainwater, the powder
Slides away like the towel attached to my head
Begging for long hair, like we all do
Admission is not weakness.

Now, I remember my mother:
A photograph; her slight smile; elegant in her white dress
on some date decades before family
before the brave jump; moving over
seas and sky; a glint of me, two years ahead
My father secure in his stethoscope, one sister tucked in
The swaddle of peace. The other just learning possibility.
I imagine their brown and black hands held together.
Logan Airport: 1974, the rush of suitcases, customs,
stamped arrival. And what next?

A February day in 1976… I landed three months early
bursting into life, clinging, already living in the first box…
the imitation of her womb…Three more months
in the hospital, a newspaper article proclaiming my freedom:
No brain damage, two sturdy legs, and a photo.
A reporter exclaimed in black and white: She’s walking
on her own two feet. A hazy image of my dress, the insistence
of the newspaper amazed at miracle baby story.
With company clinking forks and wine glasses for years
fixated at dinner wanting the details again and again…and me
old enough to hate the display the repetition.
Admission of coins at my feet. Lipstick and cologne from guests
who said, “they knew me when”.

Now, come back: 2019
A wave becomes a raising of fists, the drumbeat of shoes
over streets…signs proclaim love, signs scream for justice,
another day another boy, man, girl, woman, spitting bullets,
tied to trees with shriveled figs
seared to drops, dotted skin, blood flowers through shirts

We scream for change.
We scream for stamped papers.
We scream for a flight home.
We scream our right to exist.
We scream for longevity.
We scream to live.
We scream for throats cut short, bled out, and scrolled past.

Bright screens, discarded for nighttime TV distractions, girls forced
into another kind of show. Paraded in Vaseline, crowns, and marked
belle dresses. Their mother’s failures…If they just plastered
that smile, the ice cream already melted.
Girls forced. Powdered and programmed. Another hanger

Another hanged.

 

I had the pleasure of talking with Jo-Ann Reid about her poem, “Dependent,” featured in the upcoming Ocean State Review, and her poetic practice.

Charles Kell: The title of this poem (Dependent) is so evocative and takes the reader in many different directions at once. I think of some of the definitions of dependent: contingent on or determined by; requiring someone or something for financial or other support; unable to do without. In grammar, there can be a clause “dependent” on another clause (of a clause, phrase, or word) subordinate to another clause, phrase, or word. And I think about the myriad things we are dependent on in day-to-day life, and the things we might take for granted. Can you talk a little about the title and how it infuses the poem and the poem’s way of being?

Jo-Ann Reid: Thank you for your thought-provoking and cohesive questions. As for the title of the poem, there are several layers that it provokes. Children and the way that they walk through the world is very much tied to what is modeled within their families as well as what they are taught outside the home, in school, and among or removed from their peers. A child’s self-image is often determined by firsthand and secondhand experiences. If a child is excluded from familial and/or social acceptance, that sense of isolation, fear, and worry leaves marks. When a child’s psyche is scarred by trauma, their innocence is skewed. The poem hinges on how identity is constructed through cultural norms. Physical, emotional, and mental health hinge on what we are exposed to as we grow up. Puberty can be a precarious time. Strict gender constructs impose expectations for behavior, appearance and demeanor. Racial constructs can be equally confusing. The first experiences of puberty, racism, and gender discrimination embody the divisiveness that is perpetuated by systemic ignorance. However, progress is evident in some ways. Gender fluidity is currently at the forefront of breaking down the rigid boxes that people are placed or perhaps forced into due to rigid expectations. We are living in an ever-critical time. Although we are still plagued by social ills, the level of awareness, education, and activism that we are seeing from young people is the spark for hope and change. Yes, children are resilient but it takes hard work, self-love and empowerment to progress toward acceptance. We still have much work to do when it comes to inclusivity and safety for all. Acceptance must be modeled by those closest to a child. The masks that both children and adults wear perpetuate the pressure that we internalize. Self-love must be the starting point. Exposure to difference and honesty are critical. When that exposure is lacking, the short and long-term consequences can be devastating.

CK: The first stanza jumps out, particularly your use of the second-person pronoun. This use wends throughout the poem. Can you touch upon the second person and how that opens up the poem in different ways?

JAR: The use of the second-person addresses both the speaker and those who are living outside of the speaker’s experience. The themes of racism, sexism, cultural violence and activism affect both victimizer and victim. If we are to truly work toward inclusivity and genuine acceptance, the victimizer must acknowledge the effects of that hatred. The victim must have support systems to heal. Trauma isolates people from themselves and the world around them. Empowerment is possible. We see that in action every day. The scars of trauma do not have to destroy. The voices of activists in the poem evokes how anger becomes protest and activism. Positive change is dependent on identifying and empathizing with others. We spend so much time comparing ourselves to one another in this culture. But real change is possible when we stop being complacent and sheltered. Acceptance saves lives and we are responsible for each other.

CK: Also, in the first stanza there is a tense juxtaposition of images that ensconce one in childhood while simultaneously illustrating childhood slipping away. This idea is further alluded to with attention on the “small black hands.” There is a way childhood is different, in many aspects, for black children and parents. Although there are many pressures and fears that white parents face, there are some worries that white parents do not have to face. Can you talk about the deft legerdemain used in the first stanza?

JAR: The innocence and safety of black children and other so-deemed “minority” groups are literally under fire. Of course, this is not new in any way. The influence of parenting and media is widespread. Black children learn what they are up against very quickly in this society. Any member of a marginalized group has those “before and after” life altering experiences. Growing up and the freedom that should come with that is interrupted and skewed in those first incidents of racism and internalized racism. Black parents talk with their children about safety and survival from the time that child can comprehend what they are up against. Black people all over the world connect with many of the same obstacles. Black parents fear that their children may not return home safely at the end of the day. Of course, all parents who invest in their child’s health and future share the similar fears. However, the threat is more immediate for people who are viewed as “other” due to race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, socioeconomic status, citizenship or what have you. In the first stanza, the images of “the small black hands” alongside the exoticization of the speaker by her peers represents her sense of self slipping away. The question of who this child is and what will happen next is threaded throughout the poem as it opens up to other ways in which we are split down the middle in this society.

CK: This difficult juxtaposition is so hard to do in poetry—your opening does a number of important things: it grabs the reader’s attention with an urgent statement, yet the statement is equally balanced by the startling imagery, particularly the “string of balloon” and the small black hands / Dotted with carnival ice cream.”  Can you discuss the balance here?

JAR: Again, thank you so much for your response. It can be challenging to infuse poetry with imagery as well as a bit of social commentary without being preachy. A reader is invited into a poem through a statement or an image. However, that statement, whatever it may be is dependent on the imagery evoked by it. That can be a precarious balance or not. Weaving urgency with additional layers of imagery is significant. Sometimes it flows quickly with the same urgency within the poem. At times, the process is much slower. There is a stillness that comes over me when writing certain poems. As often as that might occur, the compulsion to write about complex subjects creates a more fevered energy alongside the work. The image of a child enjoying the simplicity of an ice cream cone shifts with the interruption of adulthood. I am still compelled to explore how those changes are affected by the personal and the political. If a child feels that they have no voice or protection, the journey is that much more difficult. However, a child who grows up in a family of love and support is not immune to alienation, confusion, or a negative self-image. That is a scary thought that may lead to feelings of helplessness. With hard work, care, and motivation, that fear can transform into self-love, empathy, and strength. Of course, it starts with the individual and their support systems. Poetry is powerful in the way that it allows a reader to see themselves represented in realistic ways. I look to poetic mothers such as Patricia Smith, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks among others. At the same time, poetry about subjects that exist outside of a person’s experience are just as critical to human understanding.

CK: I love how you mention your poetic mothers, you poetic interlocutors, I immediately think of Patricia Smith’s singular poem, “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (for Those of You Who Aren’t), and the lines “primping in front of the mirrors that deny your / reflection. it’s finding a space between your / legs, a disturbance at your chest, and not knowing / what to do with the whistles.” I’m then struck by the powerful opening of your second stanza: “Giving way to a shirt flowered / First sign of breasts; age 10 betrayed you.” There is such an immediate attention and tension focused on the body that is illustrated through bold statements— “I was a new creature”—as well as direct physical movement and taste, a taste that swerves from food (ice cream) to “the taste of hatred.” This focus also extends in the third stanza. Can you look at your focus on the body, on the body as site of pleasure and displeasure, of intensity and pain, of all the in-between things, of wishing to be what one is not, and talk about it a little?

JAR: Cis girls experience the interruption of puberty. Whether she hopes for or dreads those changes, each physical, emotional, and mental shift results in a myriad of outcomes and consequences. This speaker’s shift into puberty is conflated with the ever-growing knowledge that every flowering into womanhood shrivels against the lies that girls are told about what it means to be a so-called real girl or woman. Breasts still symbolize evidence of femininity, sexuality, and preparedness to fulfill cultural expectations of motherhood. While familiar with outside predators of all kinds, the speaker learns that her shifting body also draws eerie attention from her peers. The bathroom girls act as gatekeepers to acceptance. The speaker is poked and prodded as if she is a new thing to be categorized by others. She is held apart from her own naming. The speaker is removed from the full-throated freedom of childhood and thrust into a new body that is not her own. The memory of an ordinary day of ice cream cones gives way to clean hands, properly folded legs, and dependence upon others to find self-worth. For black girls, there is another layer. The images we often see reflected of us are caricatures: Jezebels, thugs, mammies, pickaninnies, and shrews. Any signs of independence, power, tenacity, and sense of self are tainted by the systemic ugliness that still marks us. We are viewed as an exotic threat. A thing to be conquered, re-colonized, and kept firmly in place. Hands up. No sudden movements.

CK: Stanza four dramatically jumps from the immediacy of the speaker toward the speaker’s memory, particularly of the mother and family, and of a seismic move to a new country. In many ways I think of memory, in one sense, as a cognitive trick we can simultaneously call on at all and as a thing that can overrun and control our lives, a thing we sometimes have no control over. Also, I like to think of memory as a way of looking. How does memory function as a way of “looking,” here, and, perhaps, as a way of “moving”?

JAR: The use of memory grounds the speaker as she is imagining her family moving to this country before she is born. In a sense, she conjures images of her family before she was born. As the speaker imagines the impact of her own troubled and very premature birth, the security of movement from her family’s country of origin to a new place gives her both peace and worry. Her birth and the very real possibility that she would not survive equally fascinated and worried the girl. The question of whether or where she should fit into this world was always there. An unanswered question. The exposure of questions regarding her ability to exist, survive, and perhaps thrive set the tone. Her struggle for survival marks her body and brain. She is uncomfortable being the “miracle baby”.

CK: Stanza five again focuses on the past, this time the speaker recalling her birth. Much of “Dependent,” to me, at least, reads magical, as though it possesses fantastical elements. However, nothing specifically “magical” happens in the traditional way we think of magic. This stanza, though, the middle stanza of the poem, balances birth, the creation of the speaker, her “bursting into life, clinging, already living in the first box…” Again, the wonderful attention to movement, the paradox of simultaneously “bursting” while also “clinging,” can you talk about how the speaker’s “memory” is at work here, and how “freedom” is initially looked at in this section?

JAR: The image of “bursting into life” symbolizes the rush to enter life at any cost. As an infant, the speaker is eager to be freed into the world only to find that the very thing that saves her life, confines her tightly into a space over which she has no say or control. The first roadblock that comes with a residue of confinement as protection raises the question as to whether she can ever be autonomous without being tethered down in some way.

CK: The next stanza focuses on the speaker, still quite young, in the middle of what seems like a party, or a party-like atmosphere. What strikes me at this moment is the young speaker’s antipathy: “and me old enough to hate the display / the repetition. Admission of coins at my feet. Lipstick and cologne from guests / who said, ‘they knew me when.’” Whereas earlier memory and the past are encountered through a different lens, sensations, here, the speaker wants nothing to do with it, wants to move on. Dependent perhaps moving toward independent. Could you discuss this movement?

JAR: The frustration of the speaker relates to the exposure she feels deep within her as the story of her birth wows the company that arrives to her childhood home. Her story is filtered through overheard conversations. She is unable to tell the story that already defines her young life. The pressure to earn the miracle stems from the knowledge that she was the sole premature infant to survive that week. The expectation to live up to that gift frustrates the young girl who cannot yet know the power of her own story. She can only see that she is living on borrowed time. Perhaps a mistake was made and she was not meant to be. The cologne and lipstick-stained greetings result in yet another confinement. As she is further marked by signs of wonder and gratitude, she feels ashamed by uneasiness in her own skin: a box from which she cannot escape. Their joy exacerbates her fears. Can she give herself a new name and shed this thin skin once and for all?

CK: Stanza seven thrusts both the speaker and reader into the present, the violent present, where the body is occupying the interstice, the in-between space of resistance, of fighting back and wanting to protest while at the same time there is the repetition of “another day / another boy, man, girl, woman, spitting bullets, tied to trees with shriveled figs / seared to drops, dotted skin, blood flowers through shirts.” Can you talk about the immense push-pull, the physical spaces so compactly occupied in this stanza?

JAR: As an adult, the speaker is immersed in the revolution of protest amidst the same cycles of hate that have continued to challenge and divide this country. Now, firm in her political-consciousness and activism, the speaker now understands the critical power in community. There is anger and frustration as we move through the same chaos of violence, ignorance, and apathy. The lynching imagery, the cyclical death of the body, the DNA of generational scars, and those who stand up in true protest take up the cause for justice and equality. Social media activism is stagnant if there is no follow-through. It is only an echo of something much more powerful and urgent. We scroll past tragedy every day. Some give pause while others move on for their own reasons. Others hashtag “thoughts and prayers”. Many parrot empathies in between food-related posts and travelogues. The things that give us pause to reflect, learn, and raise awareness are critical. If we barely pause or just idly scroll past human tragedy, we limit our own ability to truly engage with what is happening among and around us every day.

CK: The anaphora of “we scream” punctuates and jars the reader in stanza eight. The “scream” appears to be working on multiple levels: a scream of pain / anguish, a scream of recognition, a scream of wanting to be heard. What necessitates the repetition of “we scream” that anchors the beginning of each line? I am also quite struck with the last three words of the stanza: “and scrolled past” as though the anguish, the horror, are simply things we “scroll past” each day on our many devices. That, perhaps, we register, but only for a second. That there are such things as Facebook / Twitter activism and / or recognition, but what does this type of engagement do? Is this a thread running through these words? The penultimate stanza hints at this, our collective “TV distractions,” and the poem and everything this poem seems to represent is close reading, concentration, engagement, which the final two words of the poem drive home. How does this end section call out and call attention to these things?

JAR: The “We” is critical because the speaker now understands that humanity depends on true connection. Complacency is the death of humanity and accountability. We are each other’s keepers and divisiveness only derails us. If we refuse our own voices, let go of our power, or fail to seek it out, we silence ourselves and resist change. And as Audre Lorde, foremother poet and activist taught us: “Your silence will not protect you.”

Jo-Ann Reid is an Associate Professor of English in the School of Liberal Arts at Dean College. Her poetry takes on issues of social justice, gender and sexual identity, the black body, and the first-generation immigrant family experience. Professor Reid holds a BA in English from the University of Hartford and an MFA from The Pennsylvania State University. While pursuing her MFA, Ms. Reid was honored with a poetry prize by visiting judge Harryette Mullen. Her work appeared in publications such as, Barrow Street, New Verse News, Knot Magazine, The Ocean State Review, and most recently in Literary Mama: Writing About the Many Faces of Motherhood. Her chapbook, Bellow, was a finalist for a Paper Nautilus Book Prize. Ms. Reid is also a Pushcart Prize nominee.