My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 50

Sometimes the freedom work, the
crossing or blurring of the boundary,
happens in more subtle ways.
In poems like “Requiem” and “Anodyne”
we see perceived boundaries between
nonhuman and human bodies blurred.
In this excerpt from the beginning of
“Anodyne,” for example, we witness the
celebration of a crooked and gorgeous
human body:

“nigh++time, always divining”
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I love this body
made to weather the storm
in the brain, raised
out of the deep smell
of fish & water hyacinth,
out of rapture & the first
regret. I love my big hands.
I love it clear down to the soft
quick motor of each breath,
the liver’s ten kinds of desire
& the kidney’s lust for sugar.
This skin, this sac of dung
& joy, this spleen floating
like a compass needle inside
nighttime, always divining
West Africa’s dusty horizon.
If we think about music first, we notice
Komunyakaa’s use of breath and the
catalogue. This is a poem of descriptions
and of lists, and the lists of this excerpt
alone are punctuated by six commas
and four ampersands. Which is to say,
his is a music of expansion here.
The first phrase — “I love this body” —
seems to be a complete thought or
syntactical unit. It has its own line.
It could stand alone as its own sentence.
But then the next line builds on and
qualifies the body (made to weather
the storm) and, again, we think that
might be the end of the phrase, but the
lack of punctuation pushes us forward
and we realize we’re falling into another
sequence of descriptions and qualifiers.
This is a music built out of patterns and
ruptures, or variations, in the patterns.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

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Each of these brilliant and powerful
figures were people who worked to
free themselves and to transcend the
brutality of circumstance and vengeance.
It is this freedom work, this expansion
of person, imagination, and possibility
that Komunyakaa is engaged with
thematically, musically, visually, time
and time again.