Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s “When”

Black death has prompted a number of sonnets that have formed a literary record of how the poet reaffirms humanity in the face of racialized violence on the Black body. Whether we are discussing the latest protest—at this writing, it would be on behalf of Breonna Taylor, the African American woman who was murdered in her own home by agents of the state—or the untold number of Black people who were killed by mobs in 1919 and who inspired Claude McKay to write his canonical poem, “If We Must Die.” Taking McKay’s sonnet as exemplar, given its status in the canon of African American letters, we see Black death strictly through a masculine lens, calling for a lockstep militarized response to racialized violence that captures a measured scene of Black male rage, creating a template by which Black sonnets discussing Black death are judged. Nevertheless, our scholarly literature is finally catching up to the reality that Black women have been writing sonnets for a long time, dating back to Phillis Wheatley in the 18^th century. Without the careful reading of Black women poets alongside Black men in our literary discourses on the sonnet, our record of Black life is incomplete, and so much of our humanity erased. There is much delight in reading the ways in which the poet Elizabeth Alexander, while responding to Black death, makes some radical revisions on what we call the “protest sonnet.”

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Alexander’s and McKay’s poems offer a timely juxtaposition as they engage with the topic of Black death using the sonnet form and allow us to measure attitudes about gender performance and respectability as it relates to living and dying. We can almost feel the heaviness of Black death from McKay’s “If We Must Die” as death is referenced six times. But as we read further, we understand that death is not the focal point of the sonnet. The question McKay raises is: “How” do we live? Death is a great possibility for Black people in the poem. Hence, the recurring line, “If We Must Die.” However, McKay does not treat death in absolute terms; he invokes the conjunction “if,” making it a conditional prospect. “If We Must Die / let it not be like hogs.” Again, McKay is concerned with how Black men live, if we die, extolling courage and honor as virtues to espouse. This poem is a call to arms. The speaker takes on the persona of a general preparing his troops for battle. In these 14 lines, we get a temperature for the year 1919—perhaps one of the bloodiest summers for Black Americans in history—but also of what the model of Black manhood should look like: fearless, ready for battle, a noble soldier.

When we read McKay’s “If We Must Die,” there is little question as to whether it is a protest poem. The sonnet even ends with the words “fighting back.” However, Elizabeth Alexander illustrates Black men as the opposite of a soldier, and in so doing takes us off the battlefield. The Black men that inhabit this throwback to the 1980s are “divine,” “spea[k] French,” “ha[ve] read everything.” These are the Black men who likely attended Yale with the poet. These are post-Civil Rights Black men who can choose how and where they’d like to fight. It is only towards the poem’s final line that we see that the battle these Black men are fighting is an internal one. Alexander writes, “[they] photographed well, did not smoke, said ‘Ciao,’ // then all the men’s faces were spotted.”

This final line describes lesions on the face that were consistent with those who were HIV+ during previous generations. The image is significant because it pivots the poem. We do not get any mention of death through the entire poem, and yet it waits ominously in the final line. This choice speaks to Alexander’s dexterity as a poet: the poem becomes a double-enclosure; structurally it is silent about the AIDS epidemic within the poem, the way...