Black Daughter/Father Poetics: Beyond Patriarchal Longing

My work is an oracle practice. Again and again I sit down with questions I cannot answer and I journey. I don't ever necessarily arrive at an answer, but I do move. Some people in my family open up the Bible to any page, close their eyes and place their finger on a verse and trust the words they touch to heal and help them. I am the same. Except I turn to phrases from Black women theorists and I choose them with my eyes open. I choose the phrases that disrupt my breathing.

Recently my father died of metastasized prostate cancer. And now I have another question with no answer. How do I grieve and honor my father? How do I create a Black feminist relationship across death that does not reproduce an afterlife of patriarchal longing? Even though my father did not play a traditionally patriarchal role for most of my life and even though, miraculously, as a straight man in his 50s and early 60s he identified himself as a queer Black feminist poet like me, I find the structures of patriarchy shaping my expressions of mourning, holding hostage the legibility of my grief.

So I turned to the oracle for help with a Black feminist father/daughter poetics for this moment. These are poetic movements prompted by phrases or even single emphasized words from two theoretical essays by Black women:

1. 1. "The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers," by Hortense Spillers.

2. 2. "Ethno or Sociopoetics," by Sylvia Wynter.

And this is where it took me:

concrete

hard place of sidewalk shin splints. sharp place of saws cutting bone. get your tools away from my father. i said leave my father alone. harsh land of reluctant healthcare, bright maze of emergency rooms. if you cared anything about wellness, he wouldn't have to have left so soon. smooth place of lying answers, paper stacks of barrier walls. life doesn't have to be this heavy. shouldn't be this heavy at all. echo loop of media gunshots. replication of black on attack. my father does not belong to you. he's ours. now give him back.¹

a puzzle not a closure

look for the poems. look for the lost poems. look for your own poems that you didn't know you would need. look for the new poems. look for some better poems then the ones you deleted this week. look for some black burnt into backwards. smudge them like blackbirds of creation. see if the sky helps, if there's something else, that can undo the cremation.²

African-American-Father-Gone

there is the hat from the African naming ceremony. there are the Members Only jackets. there is that issue of Black Enterprise where being a token involved in the cultivation of tokens was called mentorship. there are the clothes of different sizes. from that phase of his life where he only ate raw and got skinny off of carob chocolate birthday cakes. from that other phase of his life where he got fat off of going out to dinner with rich people who were supposed to invest in the real estate project. there are the shoes. there are the printouts of poems. always perfect on the first draft. there are the pictures of us that he carried from place to place. and there they are, the books and journals and prison newspapers with my writing in them. the candy. the medication. the socks that didn't stop neuropathy. the ointments. the diapers. the urinal bottle. the phone. the very basic phone i used to call him on. but not enough.³

"abscence"

you know. i got used you not being around. a long time ago. i trained myself to only expect to see you on certain weekends. i got used to you falling asleep when you took us to the movies. present through snoring. it was normal that you watched tv all through our weekends together and we, the kids, just played video games and asked you to...