{"id":10943,"date":"2019-09-19T17:20:28","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T16:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10943"},"modified":"2019-09-23T12:54:15","modified_gmt":"2019-09-23T11:54:15","slug":"patricia-smith-incendiary-art-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10943","title":{"rendered":"Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art<\/strong><\/em> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art<\/em> | Bloodaxe Books: \u00a312<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2026and indeed it is. There is, perhaps, little surprise about the contents of much of this immensely powerful book. Given the events that are reported, and, as Smith would undoubtedly say, not reported, on our screens each day, Smith has a harrowing if ready stream of subject matter. That subject matter is summarised on the back cover as \u2018the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of the mothers of murdered African American men.\u2019 As Smith herself puts in, \u2018Our sons don\u2019t burn their cities as a rule, \/ born, as they are, up to their necks in fuel.\u2019 These lines are from the couplet which ends the title poem; itself part of the opening sequence of the book entitled \u2018Incendiary\u2019. The sequence explores the resonances and ramifications among the African American community of the death of 14-year-old, Emmett Till in September, 1955. Till was murdered by two white men after supposedly offending a white woman in a grocery store. Till\u2019s murder has inspired a range of America\u2019s very greatest writers from William Faulkner and Langston Hughes to Bob Dylan, Gwendolyn Brooks and James Baldwin. Smith begins both the \u2018Incendiary\u2019 sequence and the book itself with the poem \u2018That Chile Emmett in That Casket\u2019, with, underneath the title, the description \u2018Photo, Jet magazine, Sept. 15, 1955<\/em>\u2019. That famous\/infamous photo is now bandied about young black males \u2018when, as Mama said, you showed your ass<\/em> by sassin<\/em>\u2019 or backtalking. \u2026 She meant white men could \/ turn you into a stupid reason for a suit, that your last face would be silt, \/\/ stunned in its skid and worshipped, your right eye reborn in the cave \/ of your mouth.\u2019<\/p>\n

Incendiary Art<\/em> is a substantial book of 129 pages. And there is not a single page which does not show an extraordinary, incandescent imagination. Thus, it is no surprise that Smith uses an epigraph from another extraordinary imagination, Ted Hughes, for the second, heart-breaking section of the book. This is the section called, \u2018When Black men drown their daughters\u2019; which is exactly what this section explores. Smith describes in forensic detail exactly what fathers did to drown their often very young daughters. And it might well appear heartless to home in on Smith\u2019s technique at this moment, but if she were not a consummate technician, then the poems would seem lurid or melodramatic, or even just offensive. But Smith knows exactly the weight of each word in each line and verse. It is entirely invidious to quote from these poems as each part fits together immaculately to offer a relentless and inevitable whole. However, to illustrate Smith\u2019s method, here is a section from early on in the sequence, in a sub-section entitled \u2018The Five Stages of Drowning\u2019; this section details the death of the 3-month-old Zara Adur-Raheem at the hands of her father. <\/p>\n

\tThere is no drunk like the drunk of milk sleep.
\n\tA drizzled white floods the body and weighs down
\n\teverywhere we think we know about awake.
\n\tZara\u2019s new clockwork staggers with it while Daddy,
\n\tgrizzle and wild-eye, lobs her like trash over
\n\tthe rusting rail. Inside the sack, the wriggling child
\n\tcannot translate fly, plummet, descend<\/em>. She doesn\u2019t
\n\trealize the hard questions she poses for pigeons
\n\tor how, so dull and stupid with dairy, she is all
\n\tthe fall the sky can language. Babies accept what
\n\tthey are given. <\/p>\n

I have quoted at length here to illustrate the way Smith works inside the experience. Smith, clearly a mother herself, details the innocence and helplessness of the baby, within an imagining of what the baby actually might<\/u> know. The father\u2019s intervention is swiftly but powerfully described, and then the reader is returned to the baby in the sack. That experience is then slowed down by Smith in a kind of anthropomorphising distance that paints the \u2018reactions\u2019 of the pigeons and alsoof the sky itself. This latter \u2018she is all \/ the fall the sky can language\u2019 is both mimetic with the rhyme of \u2018all\u2019 and \u2018fall\u2019. However, by turning \u2018language\u2019 into a verb, the line is also mimetic of the linguistic disjunction of trying to place the experience into words in the first place. It is clear that the sky does not either actually experience the fall of the baby in the bag or, like the child itself, have any means of communicating that experience even if it did experience it. However, the sky is, like the reader, an appalled and impotent witness. And then that final devastating sentence with its careful split across the verse boundary. <\/p>\n

The final section of the book, \u2018Accidental\u2019, moves from the damaged nature of some areas of fatherhood in the US to a series of explorations, \u2018For the mothers of the lost<\/em>\u2019. Here, at the top of each page, Smith provides epigraphs for each poem which detail in bland reportage the deaths of young, black men at the hands of policeman. Smith adopts a variety of voices for the poems in this section, including the voice of one of those policemen. In one of the few third person narratives in the section, Smith responds to the death of \u2018Shereese Francis, 30, a schizophrenic, [who] had stopped taking her medications and needed an ambulance. Police arrived, handcuffed an agitated Shereen, and held her facedown on a mattress until she went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing.\u2019 Again, Smith\u2019s extraordinary imagination provides the reader with a compelling picture of Francis\u2019 suffering: \u2018with flecks of his spit in her perm \/ and a prickly pressure suppressing her spine, \/ maybe she thought that the abrupt theft of beat \/ was how Jesus ended mayhem in the body- \/ with all the mayhem at once and then none. \/ Her life, relived at its end, unreeled as brash \/ cinema. It was lucid, as bright as backhand:\u2019 Once more, Smith\u2019s technique moves the reader in and out of the immediacy of Francis\u2019 death; from the actions of the policeman and its physical effect on Francis, into Francis\u2019 own experience of her own death. Clearly, this latter is Smith\u2019s imagination at play. But what Smith does here is to refer to the death in biblical and heroic terms. Where such deaths are subsumed within yet another newspaper headline, Smith\u2019s imagination animates them (pun intended) to wrest the death from newsprint and move it not only to another level of reality, but to bring that death a wider, almost apocalyptic resonance. As Marlon James is quoted on the back cover puff, \u2018Incendiary Art<\/em> is the fire this time.\u2019 As noted, were Smith not such a very gifted technician, so much of the writing would simply be melodrama. <\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s concentration on the resonances of fatherhood and motherhood in this book give all this suffering a devastating, and inescapable relevance to all lives. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | Bloodaxe Books: \u00a312 \u2026and indeed it is. There is, perhaps, little surprise about the contents of much of this immensely powerful book. Given the events that are reported, and, as Smith would undoubtedly say, not reported, on our screens each day, Smith has a harrowing if ready stream of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nPatricia Smith | Incendiary Art | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10943\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | Bloodaxe Books: \u00a312 \u2026and indeed it is. 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