Bury My Clothes. Roger Bonair-Agard
Praise for Bury My Clothes
“These poems offer up a speech textured with both the violence of racial construction and the complicated gorgeousness born out of survival and adaptation. These poems insist on the beauty of the darknesses we are bound by, and mean to help us live by reminding us: there is no crevice of grief or grace where something does not bloom.”
—Aracelis Girmay, author of Teeth and Kingdom Animalia
“Bury My Clothes is the sound of language breaking open. Bonair-Agard is reaching farther both in time and in syntax to say more than he has ever said before. It is a masterwork in which the poet has found ‘the canopy of night black enough for everything he’s ever wanted to say.’”
—Karen Finneyfrock, author of Ceremony for the Choking Ghost and young adult novel The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door
“Bury My Clothes is a gut-level read, one that you must prepare for with not only your head, but also your body. These unapologetically relentless stanzas, practically quivering with funk and resolve, will slam their fists into places you have not yet discovered. Serving up a gospel that teeters on the blade edge between calm and chaos, one of poetry’s premier storytellers has taught the city to speak with his voice.”
—Patricia Smith, National Book Award finalist, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
“Bury My Clothes is a breadth of language that straddles Arouca and Chicago, hip-hop and calypso with the brawling, affirming righteousness of the Black televangelist leading us through violence and love to the wealth of unexpected tenderness.”
—Earl Lovelace, author of Is Just a Movie
“In his profound meditation ‘State of Emergency’ Roger Bonair-Agard writes ‘I don’t know / What to think people expect anymore; / when the word black, blooms all inside / their bodies like smoke and blood; who / do they expect to walk out of this fog.’ If there is a poet for this Zeitgeist, of Arab Spring, of governments toppling, a poet to listen to the people, a poet not just for this country but all countries, a poet I have been looking for my whole life, it is Roger Bonair-Agard. Part Aimé Césaire, part Hikmet, part Black Arts Movement, part hip-hop-nonstop-body-rock Brooklyn, he sees beyond borders to erase them with words. A poet of family, and funk ‘ordained in the boogie,’ of celebration and hallelujahs, and loss. Of knowing loss. And going on, as we all must go, Roger helps us go on, even though ‘All airports now make you weep. You come / from weeping—Wednesday’s child. 23. You come / from woe. Your mother and your passport tell you so.’”
—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of All I Ask for Is Longing
Copyright © 2013 Roger Bonair-Agard
Published in 2013 by
Haymarket Books
PO Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
In Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgravemacmillan.com.au
All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com
ISBN: 978-1-60846-269-8
Cover design by Brett Neiman.
Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Hudley Vincent de Paul Bonair, and for the girl; coming
Foreword
. . . the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted . . .
—Derek Walcott
Punk rock, new wave and soul,
Pop music, salsa, rock and roll,
Calypso, reggae, rhythm and blues,
Mastermix those number-one tunes.
—MC G.L.O.B.E.
The new American poet thinks in many tongues . . .
—Meena Alexander
For one thing, Bury My Clothes uncovers histories, violence, rhythms, fusions, and disjunctions that have been previously hidden in our received traditions. For another, Roger Bonair-Agard, with his third full-length poetry collection, is asking who and what exactly gets damned, who does the damning, how. And of what remains, who and what are we going to call holy? All of which brings me to two things I know about the word calypso: (1) the European etymology of the word has a Greek root that means “to conceal” or “to hide”; (2) calypso shares that same etymology with the word hell.
In part, Bury My Clothes is a story of political and personal rage. It uncovers and damns and praises not just the quintessence of rage (which is chaotic and dull) but the story of what rage makes and what it bloody breaks. What rage can do with and without love.
And if you were lucky you had some money
left over for dress pants too because John
was sick with a needle and thread, even
if he did once beat his wife so badly, she had to run
naked into the yard and we wondered why
she couldn’t just run away from a man
with a lick-foot. (“Back to School”)
Scenes like this strobe throughout the book, complicating the speaker’s moral stance and his male privilege. It is a deep examination of a young man’s prolonged adolescent vanities and brutality. The insistent question for Bonair-Agard is how to become a good man.
There is no such thing as kindness and cruelty in pure form. They been grinding their hips together for so long, sometimes we can’t tell one from the other. The heroes who stride through this collection are never without trouble. And it seems it is the trouble that makes them—as well as the slick music of their speech, which seems to be attuned to the music of their living.
There is the speaker’s encounter with Roaring Lion, calypsonian who sang the song from which Bonair-Agard epigraphs the first section. There are the men at the bar who christen the young man into a world where rum is sacrament, where a young man learns grit, where he hones his proper bearing among elders. There is the father over the phone in the middle of a government-instituted “state of emergency” who is at risk of being picked up for being black, who can’t simply say “I’m afraid,” because those aren’t the rules. A father of a certain stature and comportment doesn’t say those things. But a poet. A poet does. As does Bonair-Agard. A poet troubles the silence.
If the father won’t unknot the tie, remove the jacket, and unbutton his perfectly pressed shirt, then the son will strip down to his own black skin—in public, in America. The poet is a fool for the truth, a goddamned fool for the bare body of the truth as well as for the truth of the body. The book is a stripping down. It enacts a freedom the father does not have. There is a dimension of speech the father will not (probably cannot) test. But the speaker (who becomes a poet) will immerse himself.
Over time, of course, women are the ones to school the speaker on how to be a man. A mother, for example, who
accosted our father at his lover’s house
and he tried to beat her, but rather found himself, in a fistfight;
my mother turning over tables and lamps
smashing