Poetics and Care in the Wake

so many languages have fallen    off of the edge of the worldinto the dragon's mouth. some

where there be monsters whose teeth    are sharp and sparkle with lost

        people. lost poems. whoamong us can imagine ourselves            unimagined? who

among us can speak with so fragile        tongue and remain proud?

—Lucille Clifton, "here yet be dragons"¹

A centuries-old cartographical myth that continues to circulate in contemporary oral and literary traditions maintains that early maps and globes were marked with the Latin phrase "HC SVNT DRACONES," or "here be dragons," to indicate oceanic terrae incognitae whose very indeterminacy intimated certain peril should one enter such uncharted waters. Lucille Clifton takes up this myth by way of a kind of African diasporic fabulation, reimagining the motifs of hydra and sea monsters to think through the real legacies of transatlantic slave trade speculation: perpetual dispossession, trauma, and brutal violence. Lost people, as she puts it, and lost poems.

Throughout her interrogation of the temporal continuations of slavery in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe engages with the chemical oceanography term "residence time" to ascertain what science might reveal about oceanic life cycles, particularly the fates of those African and African-descended people who perished physically during the Middle Passage and similar fateful journeys, and who remain in the ocean. Substances that enter the ocean have a life cycle of 260 million years, Sharpe asserts, as everything in the ocean is recycled for near-perpetuity. Lucille Clifton, too, ponders those oceanic African bodies in a sequence of related, though not formally serialized, poems. In "atlantic is a sea of bones," Clifton relies on her imagination, rather than on scientific proof, to account for the dead. She fantastically revises the Biblical story of Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones, in which the prophet Ezekiel has a futurist vision. Ezekiel is transported to the Valley, where God instructs him to prophesy over the piles of literal bones; his words promptly resurrect the disjointed skeletons, whispering new life into their forms and making the bodies whole again. Ezekiel's participation in this fantastic vision extends an imminent, allegorical promise from God that Israel will one day be restored: "So I prophesied as He commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army."²

Clifton in turn reimagines the Biblical narrative as an allegory of Black life, aspiring into and reviving those long-dead ancestors who perished at sea, ancestors whose very existence preconditions the poet's own. Speculatively "keeping and putting life into" Black bodies,³ she writes: "maternal armies pace the atlantic floor / i call my name into the roar of surf / and something awful answers."⁴ Much like James Weldon Johnson's recourse to the Valley of Dry Bones proverb in the lyrics to "Dem Bones" (1928)—which recounts Ezekiel's promise that the dead shall rise, walk, and talk once more—Clifton's poetic rendering involves a kind of séance with the ancestral realm that reveals the spiritual, physical, and sonic persistence of the early mothers with whom she has a haunting interaction.

I have returned again and again to Clifton's work, as her oeuvre on Black womanhood, living diaspora, and the ancestors is inflected by a revisatory poetics that strives to recast and reimagine the subjects of prevailing narratives to center on the personal as well as the diasporic condition. Clifton's politics of recovery in "here yet be dragons" and "atlantic is a sea of bones" reminds me of Christina Sharpe's notion of stillness, which she explores in In the Wake as an anagram for Black life in the wake of slavery.⁵ Specifically, I am thinking here of how the titular use of yet ("here yet be dragons") and is ("atlantic is a sea of bones") in Clifton's poems recall the definitional still that Sharpe delineates to account for the always-alreadyness of global anti-Blackness and the renovations of captivity and bondage that mark the "afterlife of slavery."⁶ Each meditation, then...