My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 54

Already “whiplashed” points to a
sudden jerk of the body and the lash of
a whip. The phrase “sold-off,” used to
describe the selling of the marshlands,
also carries with it the memory of
people being “sold-off” on the auction
block at “slave” markets. The word
“off” here also implies fragmentation
and distance from the state or place
of origin.
“…whiplashed over the sold-off
marshlands…” To me the phrase
conjures the construction of the
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet.
The destruction of people and land
for the sake of commerce, market,
capital. The “salt-water” that erodes the
marshlands, might also conjure the
Middle Passage crossings. We remember,
New Orleans was a critical port city
during the trans-Atlantic “slave” trade
and had the largest “slave” market
in the domestic “slave” trade. And so,
when we talk about water and New
Orleans, the history of its people is
always present and pulsing beneath the
line’s ink horizon:

This imagery establishes that the poem’s
readers are also the viewers of this
catastrophe, perhaps aligned with “the
great turbulent eye” — surely connecting
the eye of the Hurricane (that place
of relative calm) to the eye or gaze
of the poet and the readers. There is
a complicated tension here between
the documentation of disaster and the
voyeuristic impulse. This tension
implicates or, at least, troubles the calm
or detachment of the reader.

Its repetitions. The word “already”
haunting line 13 and the last line,
reminding us that “this” has happened
before. In this case, the poem haunts,
and is haunted by, the in-between
space — the bodies and forms, unfurling.
I think of the gauzy genitalia as
potential for reproduction and pleasure,
except that they are dangling from
trees, which also insinuates death, the
brutality of lynchings, strange fruit
and the pastoral scene. The lines make
me ask, Are we witnessing a creation
story or a death story? And might these
two stories be the same? Especially
in this context of nation building as
we know it.

Later, in the poem’s last written lines
(I say “last written lines” because the
ellipses implies incompletion or language
staggering at the white space of silence),
we come to “the gauzy genitalia of
Bacchus/ & Zulu left dangling from
magnolias & raintrees/ already”.
We realize we are reading ruins. Layers
of architecture and the absented species
of birds and song. Bad weather has
exposed the history of the place.

Then enters Bacchus, the liberator, the
god of the ecstatic, of wine and
music and dance. Son of Zeus and
a mortal. Half-divine. Androgynous.
Communicant between the living
and the dead. Twice-born. Again, the
straddling of worlds.
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When we reach the phrase from line
five, “the Crescent City was already
shook down to her pilings”, we see
that Komunyakaa is pointing to the
catastrophe, violence, decay as a result
of both Hurricane Katrina and
governmental neglect of the place and
violent disregard of its people. Not only
this, though, Komunyakaa is also
pointing readers to consider the material
that created this place, its beginning,
its infrastructure (“her floating ribs, her
spleen & backbone”). The anatomy of
the human is inextricable from the
anatomy of the city. Both are vulnerable,
splayed, publicly dying.

53

“for how long/ i was [x] between worlds”

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

To read the poem is to read the seam
of history, a time between water and
atmosphere.

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