Before I begin let’s give name to the chill in our spines: a man was lynched yesterday. His name was Marcellus Khaliifah Williams and he was an innocent Black Muslim man who was violently murdered by the state. The last words he left to the government that murdered him were “all praise be to Allah in every situation.” In the face of unspeakable violence and hopelessness he chose praise. I am as inconsolable as I am in awe. I’m a skeptic of perfect timing, but here I am sharing a post with you that I wrote last week and scheduled to be sent at this very moment. The contents of this post are amplified by these current events surrounding it. I share this post in Marcellus’ name. Allah Yerhamo.
Earlier this month a local art museum approached me to do a poetry reading for their members. I thought I’d take a different route and propose a poetry tour of the exhibit. It felt like a good challenge to write ekphrastic poetry and discover the ways art & artifacts can collide with the present. My vision was intentional: I want to see more poets collaborate with visual artists and institutions that value the arts. The night before the performance, the museum’s Community Program’s Manager cc’d me in an email with the City of Anaheim confirming that my event will be recorded, shared on the city’s tv channel and preserved as an artifact of Anaheim’s cultural heritage. I wasn’t expecting that! I performed each poem and created a special edition zine entitled Memory Keepers Communion. It’s currently being sold in tandem with the exhibit only at Muzeo. The zine has my original poetry and digital collage artwork I created using images from the artifacts in the exhibit.
The exhibit at Muzeo is entitled Eternal Mourning and it’s a collection of art and artifacts from “Post-Victorian America” which is a nicer way of saying America during the Civil War. I wrote poetry about the pieces I saw and the histories I read that were different levels of beautiful and horrifying. Seeing death and mourning culture amidst the backdrop of war, enslavement, and pestilence made me think deeply about where we are in this current society.
Today I want to share one of the poems with you. It’s entitled “Pedagogy” and was inspired by three civil war era musket ball bullets that were on display. As I contemplated these bullets I thought about all the unfortunate lessons that violence and regret teach those who are willing to hear the lessons on how to become better. An American education is forged in bullets. I contemplated my own experiences with shootings. I am a public elementary school educator. Last year a student threatened to kill me and I spent the summer renegotiating how I’d continue making income. When living in a time when active shooters are an unfortunate norm, our learning is won by threats without balances. Why do bullets get to define the eras of America? I asked myself. I began the poem “pedagogy” from this inkling.
I chose anaphora as the main literary device in “pedagogy” because this is a poem about learning (pedagogy means “the approach to teaching”) and repetition is a key part of teaching. The anaphora technique is when phrases are successively repeated as if to form a litany. I feel like I’m naturally drawn to this style because of my upbringing in Catholicism, but (NGL) I am both bored and intimidated by anaphora poems. Bored because one can easily disengage from repetition. Intimidated because it takes a lot of craft to be able to repeat a phrase and pair it with engaging imagery that scratches the brain. It’s hard to do it well. (I’m still wondering if I’m doing it well in this poem tbh)
Most lines in “pedagogy” are about violence as an educator. Then comes a break, a departure. We leave the departure violently, this new form is a stabbing into the reality brokered by the previous lines in the poem. Breaking the anaphora in the poem is to add violence to violence. I like to provide solutions and extend care through my writing. Leaning into the work of extrapolating our piercing reality then proverbially stabbing it without offering some actionable next steps is foreign to me. It’s a question of my own morality as I move through a continuously violent world. This poem grieves without giving. It is a bullet wound only offering the open bleeding space created through shock and horror.
Pedagogy
we learned giving from a rotted grain in our hearts we learned brushing our teeth through dry lips and hot saliva we learned kissing as an ode to loneliness we learned drinking in the deserted spleen we learned walking by reaching for help we learned seeing after embracing darkness we learned to hurt while witnessing each other we learned shot before steel we learned war before peace we learned violence builds heartache we learned heartache builds initiative we learned, and we learned, and we learned everything in an unharmed cycle an obedient bullet taking everything away
Obedience is the death of progress. Thank you for your words!