Lyric Histories: An Investigation of Early Black (and) Native America through Poetic Vignettes
In Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, Tiya Miles addresses the importance of careful attention to and deep immersion in Black (and) Native histories, both by and for those histories’ direct descendants. In doing so, Miles turns to the foundational observations of bell hooks, who writes:
For Native Americans, especially those who are black, and for African Americans, it is a gesture of resistance to the dominant culture’s ways of thinking about history, identity, and community for us to decolonize our minds, reclaim the word that is our history as it was told to us by our ancestors, not as it has been interpreted by the colonizer (hooks 184).
Miles furthers hooks’ statement by noting that, “the void that remains when we refuse to speak of the past is in fact a presence, a presence both haunting and destructive” (Miles 3). As these two scholars remind us, the past offers not only a portal for deepening our understandings of self and community across time but also an imperative of finding new ways of reframing and reclaiming our histories. This selection of poems offers one window into this reclamation.
As a poet whose Black and Native inheritance is a mix of mythic and material ancestry, I write from an impulse to revisit, recover, and reimagine the past with the illuminating tools of creative inquiry. As a Southerner with deep family ties in the Mississippi River Delta, the foothills of the Shaconage/Great Smoky Mountains, and the Gulf Coast region, I seek deeper communion with the figures my work explores here: those who once knew, as I do, the sweltering heat and heavy air beneath the white-hot sun, a wild abundance of (mostly) life-giving plant and animal presence, the unparalleled beauty grown from blood soaked soil and labor-broken bodies. Turning to John Marrant, the Shoeboots family, and the Mardi Gras Indians, I yearn to learn more from those who have traversed some of the same mountains, forests, and shorelines—those who know, in their own way, the generations of water flowing through us. A range of poetic forms–prose poem, persona, erasure, ekphrasis, lyric, and narrative poems have allowed for various exploratory possibilities and modes of creative inquiry in examining the neighboring, overlapping, and sometimes shared communities whose archives of Black and Native experience have survived systematic attempts at erasure, silencing, essentialism, and division.
Drawing upon Saidiya Hartman's methodology of "melding history and literary imagination," this creative enterprise is one of understanding what types of life were possible in the homelands of my ancestors centuries ago, not just what people did, but how they might have felt and how they may have thought (Hartman). What might have inspired them, terrified them, uplifted them, disappointed them, made them feel more connected to their environments and each other? As the historical record remains fragmented and otherwise co-opted by the aims of empire, none of us reading, writing, and thinking today can ever truly know. But it is my hope that these poems model one way of holding the histories of those who walked this land before me, many of whose traditions, histories, wisdom, and responsibilities I inherit. This is, for me, a lifetime endeavor, one that I hope builds on the work of a rich lineage of literary predecessors to continue voicing through and beyond the enduring “void” of our contemporary moment (Miles 3).
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