Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous
Darkness. Probably all my encounters
Are existential jambalaya. Which is to say,
A nigga can survive. Something happened
In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson
And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened
In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens
Almost everywhere in this country every day.
Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters.
You won’t admit it. The names alive are like the names
In graves. Probably twilight makes blackness
Darkness. And a gate. Probably the dark blue skin
Of a black man matches the dark blue skin
Of his son the way one twilight matches another.
I'm really drawn to the word probably. I looked a little into Mr. Hayes. He has written several collections of poetry, and has been writing for a while. So I know he is both a confident and good writer.
ReplyDeleteBut his narrator is not confident. There are 5 "probably"s. The narrator's has these ideas about twilight:
1. the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon, caused by the refraction and scattering of the sun's rays from the atmosphere.
2. a period or state of obscurity, ambiguity, or gradual decline.
I was thinking about the literal twilight before I looked up the definitions. A black person would look darker at twilight. And associating dark and danger makes sense in evolution. Humans cannot see as well at night. Night is scary and twilight is approaching night.
This seems like a common idea. I've had that idea before, and it reminds me of bias studies on black people, and people and cultures all over the world have negative biases of black people. I'm only speculating now, but I could this being a spandrel (In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic characteristic that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. That is, it is a trait that is not particularly advantageous to have, though it is retained because it is not particularly harmful to have.) Or even a direct byproduct of fearing darker objects.
After looking up twilight, I love that word choice and the poem comes to life. It times up the confusion I sense from the narrator into a gradual decline.
This poem is very relevant today, "one twilight matches another." That pretty much captures the BLM movement. Too many Americans, and people globally, to not get or see it. Black people were literally and legally told they didn't matter for most of US history. And now when Americans respond with comments like, "he should have listened to the cop," it reinforces the idea that black people do not matter, or "one twilight matches another."