Respeaking the Spoken: Elizabeth Alexander’s American Sublime and the Archive

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.

—Arthur A. Schomburg (231)

Much writing on Blackness in the Archive focuses on the occlusions and silences created by the dominant culture’s large-scale erasure of black voices from the historical record.¹ Yet, over the last few decades, black American persona poets have used black historical figures whose voices are recorded in the Archive. Marilyn Nelson’s George Washington Carver in Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), Quraysh Ali Lansana’s Harriet Tubman in They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (2004), and Adrian Matejka’s Jack Johnson in The Big Smoke (2013) feature persona speakers who, while given some space within the Archive, suffer a historical portrayal that has been appropriated and redacted to best fit the Archive, which, as Bethany Hicok puts it, “privileges certain cultural narratives over others” (237). These poets’ use of persona employs their personae’s voices to challenge their representation while also using the known quality of these voices for greater rhetorical reach in their efforts to construct contemporary Blackness.

According to Howard Rambsy II, through historical persona poetry, poets are using a research-driven poetics to (re)build black folk heroes who, “Although [they] were highly visible, aspects of their lives and who they were remained illegible for many years.” As I have stated elsewhere, this enables the poets “to creatively imagine new, more complex narratives for their personae to better project the intersubjective black ‘soul’” (Sharp 373). My focus is Elizabeth Alexander’s Pulitzer-nominated American Sublime: Poems (2005), particularly its suite of poems on the Amistad Africans. This collection is an apt example of how contemporary black persona poets use known personae to challenge their subjects’ narratives and resist the Archive, and I propose a hermeneutic for reading the poetry in this tradition.

My exploration builds on Wendy Walters’s reading of Alexander’s Amistad poems and her theorization of the aspirational archive as “a reading of the past for which we may have either no evidence or compromised evidence, and yet which must be imagined as possibility” (1). Walters’s discussion of American Sublime in her Archives of the Black Atlantic: Reading Between Literature and History (2013) centers on the text as an example of black historical poetry, whereas my primary interest is Alexander’s use of persona as a means to imagine not only forgotten or redacted narratives but also the subject’s complex inner life; the “historical” can work toward the reclamation of the Amistad Africans, but it is persona as a form that lets them speak their own history—be the heroes of their own stories. I use the poems that bookend the Amistad section in American Sublime—“Amistad” and “The Last Quatrain”—to establish a methodology for my reading of the suite and theorize the spoken, a particular category of persona poetry. The spoken uses persona subjects whose voices have been recorded in the historical record but are often misrepresented and misinterpreted to suit the dominant narratives. “Amistad” and “The Last Quatrain” both literally and figuratively play in the gap where the written history stops and the creative imagination begins—a liminal space of quiet and great meaning-making potential. Reading the gaps, the poems cultivate a counternarrative of the Amistad Africans that re-visions their historicity and constructs them as not only a symbol of revolutionary violence—although this is important in and of itself as a representation of African peoples’ active resistance to their enslavement and oppression—but also as historical actors who helped facilitate their own freedom even after their uprising. The use of persona, then, emphasizes not only the Amistad Africans’ subjectivities but also their voices. This includes both what was recorded and how it falls within the historical context, in addition to what was not recorded—or what has been misrecorded—and the possibilities and potential in the empty spaces in its archival representation. Through this lens, Alexander’s use of persona strengthens a counterhistory in which the Amistad Africans are not passive, silent victims who are saved exclusively via...