Blessed Condemnation: Interconnection and Reverence in Black Nature

My hometown, at least in one way, is reminiscent of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s in her Black Nature essay “April in Eatonton,” in that “the heat . . . make[s] you sure you’ve committed a grave sin and God is punishing you for it” (249). In my poem “The Ritual of Season,” I recount the traditions we developed during my childhood in Phoenix, Arizona, and all I censured before I could name longing.

I grew up in a place that never suited me, but it afforded me many things: distance, imagination, awe. I questioned everything I couldn’t trace or see. If God was there, I loved what seemed like his fury the best. Those showy displays, strange announcement of seasons, were sent to remind me that every part of the earth was wondrous. And whether I feared or revered it, in Phoenix, nature’s power was undeniable. In monsoon season, for instance, torrential rain would soak the desert for days at a time. The water would rise so high, I’d imagine I was somewhere else, somewhere closer to what home might feel like. Those nights when the sky took on colors artists couldn’t craft, I was drawn to what always seemed to terrify others—the illuminated sky, the monsoon blaring, then everything soaked under all that dark.

When I was very young, my father’s Army unit carried us all over—New Jersey, Georgia, even Germany was home for a few wintry years. By the time we settled out West, those travels informed what I expected of nature, what I thought it owed me. Icicles every once in a while, misty rain, snow angels—Phoenix wouldn’t oblige. So it was there I learned to craft what I didn’t have and curse what I did:

daily the heavens held back their glory   and we swept angels into hard earth— donning the silt of adobe wings   mocking the sun damning her

(313)

I often wondered how anything so bare could have some “spirit” in it. But there was no denying the luminous body converging on the desert when the cicadas came. The insects, akin to locusts, covered the land and made a sound loud enough to drown out a carrying, human voice. When the dust devils swirled amidst them, it seemed that every animate and inanimate thing could be used to remind us we weren’t alone out there surrounded by the mountains, that something else could take hold of the valley, then cover it with dust and song to teach us about what connects us all.

Imagining what wasn’t and crafting what was (i.e. writing poems) was always my subtle act of resistance, especially in a land that insisted I had no history. In some parts of the West, people of color are still barely a whisper, so I was raised without natural landmarks that speak to so many Black poets in other parts of the country, no oaks or poplars, no freedom stairway or ocean mother telling me where I came from, who I might become. I had to hunt for everything, and I dug into the earth until it gave me something I could sift: a glimmer of familiar, a spark, a trail to uncover. “The Ritual of Season” is a series of questions about whether we should take the natural world as friend or foe—no matter who sent it or how it binds us. As a child, I believed questioning what was thrust upon us was a small act of resistance; it was almost as revolutionary as finding beauty in what haunted me.

Lucille Clifton, on the other hand, is an all out radical poet. It’s only fitting that one of her poems opens this collection about our complex relationships with the world we reside in for a time. In “generations” she speaks about our mishandling of the natural world and how most have taken it for granted. She is reverent and faithful to nature, but those who had the privilege of witnessing Lucille Clifton in the flesh know that her otherworldliness—and hence...