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Process Essay for "One Was Lately Lost"

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          This poem is structured around the anaphoric refrain of “the moment,” which I intended to both evoke the episodic structure of John Marrant’s narrative but also depart from it for a brief instance. In less than 40 pages, Marrant takes us through a series of events rich, detailed, and manifold enough to fill pages and pages more. Marrant himself even writes that the particulars of his reunion with family near Charles Town/Charleston would be “less interesting” and thus he would “be as brief as I can” (Marrant 121). Marrant’s narrative choices are clearly driven by the anticipation of his readership’s expectations, what some readers would expect from this kind of text and those details for which other readers “would not forgive their omission” (Marrant 121). Perhaps some of these narrative choices were also strategic attempts to conceal protected information about his intimate family life, at his own behest or theirs. This lyric meditation is not meant to offer a judgment on certain audience expectations or suggest a greater level of exposure than Marrant himself would have desired. Rather, it asks, what happens when the “moment” of narrative focus remains the same moment, suspended in lyric time, one with which we can linger deeply, examining from multiple perspectives? 

          The moment that Marrant first departs home is a pivotal juncture in his adolescence, and the first line break is meant to foreground the tension between “son” and “man,” especially because one of his inciting catalysts for fleeing was, as he tells us, that he “thought it was better for me to die than to live among such people” (Marant 115). A sentiment that echoes in our contemporary moment as perhaps reminiscent of adolescent angst but also one that likens him to the paradigmatic journeying figure—Moses, John the Baptist, King Nebuchadnezzar, and the like—who becomes ennobled through communion with God in the wilderness, a place which serves biblically as a geographic and temporal threshold between youth and adulthood, sin and anointed life, ignorance and understanding (Exodus 3:1-22, Matthew 3:1-4, Daniel 4:32-36). Later, it is the “lore of wolves and woods” that represents the belief spread among his people that Marrant “rambled in the woods, and was torn in pieces by the wild beasts” (Marrant 122). He then becomes both man and myth, both subject to the whims of the secular world and in intimate contact with the divine. The hyphenation of “son-shaped,” “not-him,” “un-die” and so on linguistically enact this liminality John Marrant occupies in several instances, as a transient figure and one of relative social mobility as well: a gray space between belonging and exclusion. This is what the first four lines are really meant to capture, as they emphasize his (mis)recognition through the eyes of a grieving mother: he is there, re-united with his kin but also not-there, as they remind him several times through various phrasings, “one was lately lost” (Marrant 121). His absence is a felt presence and even his presence reads, at first, as only a deeper reminder of the absence of who he once was. Such paradoxical duality is evoked by the homophonic doubling of “she tears” (as in, to begin crying or to become fractured). The line break after these words allows the ambiguous sentiment to resound beyond the space of the line’s end, underscoring the sense of ongoingness and cyclical time that frames its structure. Weeping begets more weeping such that one’s perception becomes literally blurred by the conditions of mourning. A mother’s son then becomes an “impossible figure,” evocative not only of the disbelief at his appearance upon his return home but also the relatively incredible events of Marrant’s narrative as a whole. His flesh and blood relatives, people who would arguably know him with more intimate familiarity more than anyone else possibly could, were not the only ones who had a hard time believing the fact of him; the narrative’s abundance of spectacular events—whether present by divine intervention or by the dramatization of the literary genre—meant that Rev. William Aldridge’s letter of authentication was deemed necessary to forestall the anticipated disbelief with which future audiences might regard the narrative’s many miracles.

          Language, the ultimate hinge that connects a contemporary readership to a figure like John Marrant, serves as this poem's central vehicle for discovery.  “Christ-prayer” as a phrase neighboring the use of the word “foreign” is especially important here, as it indicates the family’s specific unfamiliarity with the kind of Christianity that Marrant sought to proselytize, not that they were necessarily faithless, though to Marrant there was likely a collapsing of these two understandings. In other words, prayer itself is not what remains foreign in this moment; “Christ-prayer” is. “Son” begins to echo “sun,” as it parallels “Christ” within the space of the line and also conjures associations with the hymn Marrant sings while in captivity within the executioner’s dungeon, which “became my chapel”: “Thou art my soul's bright morning star, / And thou my rising sun” (Marrant 119). Accordingly, the epigraph chosen for this poem speaks to the miracle of Marrant’s survival—and its clear religious parallels—but also the “miracle” of reconciling disparate worlds: longtime believers and recent converts, Black American and Cherokee communities, the untamed wilderness and the king’s court as a space of utmost control. The enjambment of the line “he stands before those who made him” makes use of a similar productive ambiguity as in the aforementioned moments. Here, “those who made him” refers both to his family, the ones who literally birthed and raised him, but in the space of one stretch away from home, one enjambed line’s stretch of blank space across the page, he is “made [...] / a stranger, an intruder, a dead man until proven brother…” in much the same way he exists at the whim of the Cherokee hunter, king, and executioners. The double meanings this line makes possible begin to syntactically enact the paralleling of Marrant’s blood family with those the narrative portrays as his newfound brothers- and sisters-in-Christ (Marrant 118-120). The multiple possibilities of meaning here align with the ultimate revelation of how this text might offer a window into Black-Native ties. Marrant himself becomes a point of connection between communities, both thematically and syntactically paralleled by the poem’s close. As the poem’s final line is careful to demonstrate, the distinctions between them remain important enough to warrant separate language, marked clearly through punctuation, as they are named (“the hunter and his king, the youngest and her kin”). Sonically, the parallel is made clearer as “king” echoes “kin,” “brother” and “hunter,” and so on in a rhyme slant enough to accommodate the refusal of this history to fit neatly into any lexical alignment.




 

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