Roundtable by Jenny Factor and Sam Plasencia
The Age of Phillis in Forms, Found and Free—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.9
Cite: Factor, Jenny and Plasencia, Sam. 2021. “The Age of Phillis in Forms, Found and Free—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 27-31.
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In The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers takes on a work of Black poetic lineage, engaging in a process of matriarchal reclamation that makes scholarship sing. Jeffers’s more traditional prosodic engagement deftly echoes the literary ages in which the book occurs: the masterly and capacious eighteenth-century couplets (and centos) of a Pope or Dryden and the globally prescient pantoums and villanelles that evoke an oral tradition. Yet in addition to the couplets, villanelles, pantoums, and centos of the volume, Jeffers tells a story of embodiment through a more experimental use of form that must be held alongside the fixed forms as one of the most important genealogical engagements of the volume.
Poetic form—when used as part of a more complicated and nuanced aesthetic project—is not about skillful shapes and received forms alone, but it is rather about a conversation between poetic embodiment and content. In the case of Jeffers’s Phillis, the use of form, at its very essence, works through some of the same struggles that pervade any historical reading of Wheatley Peters herself—namely, how to build a robust story and vibrant sense of an author’s original living body in spite of history’s persistent lacunae about her life and the relationship between her life and her art.1 Here, the imagined body is the space the form and content are truly co-constitutive. Rhythms and shapes of breath, joy, politics, and oppression infuse the line lengths and shapes of these more experimental poems.
For example, the poem “mothering #1” is written in twenty-three lines that fluctuate between two and five syllables, mimicking the erratic and shallow inhalations of the titular Gambian mother who is out of breath from the exertion of birthing. In the following section, “The Transatlantic Progress of Sugar in the Eighteenth Century” is written in three eight-line stanzas that each start with one word or character and from there unfurl, with each subsequent line extending slightly further than the previous one. The complete poem takes up one page and takes the form of three ninety-degree triangles. These triangles may be an allusion to the triangle trade wherein Black men and women were kidnapped from Africa and transported to the Americas where their labor produced raw goods that were then shipped to England to be manufactured, which were then dispersed back across the Atlantic and down to Africa to be traded for more Black men and women. The unfurling shape of the stanzas also evokes a paracord whip that sits coiled on its user’s hip until it is used, at which point it extends outwards. That a poem about the massively successful sugar trade takes the form of an unfurling whip reminds readers of the violence that propelled eighteenth-century economies.
Some of the experimental poems in the volume repeat titles, such as “An Issue of Mercy #1,” “An Issue of Mercy #2,” and “An Issue of Mercy #3,” or “mothering #1,” and “Mothering #2.” The use of repeated titles gives the impression of these poems serving as drafts or variants of one another—an issue powerfully connected to the scholarly afterlife of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s own poetry in which one can never be certain when handling variants that may have appeared alternatively in letters, periodicals, and broadsides, of which version Wheatley Peters most approved, or even whether Wheatley Peters herself was given final authorial say over the more enduring book form of her own work.1 The poems that hearken to the theme of mercy also serve as a kind of kaleidoscopic thesaurus, echoing directly one of the most controversial lines in Wheatley Peters’s most anthologized poem (“Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land”). With each new use of mercy, Jeffers complicates and ironically deploys this challenging word.
In the two “mothering” variants, Jeffers signals the entanglement of race, violence, and archival recordkeeping by capitalizing the m in the second mothering poem, which is about Susannah Wheatley, but not in the first, which is about Wheatley Peters’s mother. The transatlantic system of enslavement and its extant paper trail are both reasons why we know of the particular being Susannah Wheatley and why we do not know of the African woman who birthed the girl who was later renamed Phillis Wheatley. The distinction in capitalization also disrupts the historicist inclination to overvaluate those for whom we have names: Jeffers gives Wheatley Peters’s mother pride of place in The Age of Phillis. For example, Wheatley Peters’s mother is the imaginative subject of the prologue, “Prologue: Mother/Muse,” where she is titularly aligned with—and positioned as—a muse. She is a central figure throughout the first major section, “Book: Before,” and is reflected back on in other poems throughout the collection. Indeed, mothering is a significant through line in Jeffers’s work. In these ways, the now unknowable woman for whom we have no proper noun reverberates through the text.
Jeffers also invents and then repeats forms, as with the twenty-five “Lost Letter[s],” the three “Fragment[s],” and four “Found Poem[s].” The “Lost Letter[s]” make key contributions to Jeffers’s engagement with what is unknown in Phillis’s lived experience. These letters are generally invented verse epistles that Jeffers imagines may have once existed—such as a lifelong correspondence between Wheatley Peters and Obour Tanner, based on the existence of extant letters indicating that they shared a friendship and perhaps a church, and a letter between Susannah Wheatley and Samuel Occom, based on a surviving reply from Occom to Wheatley that implies her opinion about Phillis’s manumission. The “Fragment[s]” often contain direct quotations from Wheatley Peters collected works. Like the recent erasure poems of Robin Coste Lewis, these “fragments” make the existing texts sound out in new ways that honor the absence written into them. The “Found Poems” usually tie eighteenth-century historic events together with contemporary twenty-first-century social history, tearing into legal documents and journalism to do so.
In our reading group, we noticed that Jeffers’s found poems usually concluded one of the volume’s ten sections. For example, the first section of The Age of Phillis, “Book: Before,” ends with “Found Poem: Detention #1,” which is a versification of Warren Binford’s interview for the New Yorker about the border camps in Texas.2 More specifically, it is a poetic rendition of the interviewer’s inquiry into how many children were imprisoned by othe facility and Binford’s answer, which detailed the overcrowding, filth, and sadness of the “warehouse” (17). Ending “Book: Before” with this found poem is a poignant critical choice. Most of this book takes place in West Africa: it imagines what it might have meant for a Gambian mother and father to have a baby girl, describes prayer rituals, and narrates the little girl as a toddler—walking to the village with Yaay (the Wolof word for “mother”) while eating mango. Put differently, the first half of this book (six pages) imagines a time before the conquest and enslavement that tore this Gambian family apart. The poem on the seventh page is titled “Fracture,” and it narrates the present-tense event of existential rupture: “the men arrive” (13). The second half of “Book: Before” (six pages) is divided between three one-page poems (the father’s “moan,” the mother’s “entreaty,” and the child’s middle passage) and then ends with the three-page found poem on the contemporary detention of children.
Jeffers’s decision to follow the African child’s middle passage with a found poem on immigration detention offers a transnational, transhistorical, and intersectional analysis of power. First, the juxtaposition draws attention to how white supremacist governments forced migration from one continent for their financial profit and also stall migration from other continents for profit. Secondly, it demonstrates that the apparatuses of enslavement in the United States persist despite the fact that de jure enslavement was abolished. Third, Jeffers’s poetic assembly transhistoricizes racialized violence in order to demonstrate how technologies of power originally practiced on enslaved Africans are now being practiced on Latinx communities. In these ways, Jeffers presents contemporary immigrant detention camps—a booming for-profit, spin-off industry of mass incarceration—as a reiteration of the racialized technologies and relations of power that organized the economies and politics of enslavement. She echoes this alignment of racial violence by concluding the second section, “Book: Passage,” with “Found Poem: Detention #2,” which versifies a Washington Post report by Michael Brice-Saddler on a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died while in the custody of the US Border Patrol. Jeffers thus compounds multiple registers of repetition—thematic, titular, formal, and conceptual—in order to demonstrate how enslavement is the blueprint for our current state-sanctioned forms of detention and death. As Christina Sharpe might describe it, such repetitions and reverberations are what it means to live in the wake of slavery, a “disaster” that is “deeply atemporal…always present.”3
One of Jeffers’s most fascinating forms challenges readers to become conscious of both the privileging practices and the social ecologies of their own acts of reading. These two three-column contrapuntal poems were likely modeled after the multicolumn, multidirectional syncopated sonnets of Tyehimba Jess, who popularized the form in his recent collections Olio (2016) and Leadbelly (2005).4 Jess’s two books also use archival materials to make poetry of the lives of African American artists in history. Two of these multicolumn poems are found in The Age of Phillis. The first, “The Mistress Attempts to Instruct Her Slave in the Writing of a Poem,” is organized into three columns. The left and right columns each contain an extra line at the top comprised of just a name: “Phillis” initiates the left column and “Susannah” begins the right column. In between them is a column wherein each line is italicized, in brackets, and ranges between two and five syllables. This poem’s structure invites readers to play with the order of reading. You can read by prioritizing each column: read from top to bottom and left to right, or reverse that order and start at the bottom. Alternatively, you can prioritize lines: from left to right and top to bottom or in reverse. You could even read from right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top. The complexity of these multiple arrangements and how they shape the poem’s meaning is intensified by the note that prefaces the poem: “This verse to the End is the Work of Another Hand. / –Addition by Phillis Wheatley at the bottom of ‘Niobe in Distress’” (53). This preface calls into question the center column of italicized and bracketed phrases: are these—as in the lost letters—internal thoughts? If so, whose? Susannah’s? Or are these the distressed thoughts of the “Niobe”?
The second contrapuntal poem, “chorus of the Mother-Griotte,” is even more complex. It’s found in the section entitled “Muses: Convening,” in which Jeffers, following the titular allusion to the Greek sister goddesses, assembles seven women’s voices, including the Yoruban water deity Yemoja and Ona Judge, a Black woman enslaved by Martha Washington. “Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” is the second poem in the section, preceded by Yemoja and succeeded by an enslaved mother named Isabell. “Griotte” refers to the “Griots,” a highly respected traveling group of oral historians in West Africa—storytellers, singers, poets, and musicians who reposit and performatively share history. As with the Griots, this poem tells a history that comprises many histories: of a girl “who was sold,” stood “naked in the corner,” and marched through the “door of no return” (92). As with the first contrapuntal poem, Jeffers makes use of three columns; however, in this poem, the text is further divided into five three-line segments. Each grouping is preceded by a short phrase, centered above the middle column: “amnesiac wood,” “sailing knot to knot,” “jealous sharks,” “on the battlefield,” and “in God’s name.” For example, the first grouping is as follows:
amnesiac wood
nostrils of girls who was bought uncle’s hand
guts on the air who was old defeated man
history’s charnel I say trader’s silver
While each grouping might still hold the possibility of a multidirectional reading experience, Jeffers controls her reader’s movement through the use of short poetic lines that anticipate—or perhaps introduce or frame—each three-line grouping. These framing lines force the reader to move from top to bottom and make readers contend with each grouping before moving on to the next.
“Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” is another beautiful example of how Jeffers intertwines structure and content: this poem’s arrangement bespeaks a certain kind of historical movement that is both punctuated and indefinable. Jeffers represents the passing of time and experience as demarcated by violence: the knots that tie African wrists during transport, the sharks who follow slave ships, the battlefield that brought death but not Black liberation (in 1775 and 1862). What is so brilliant about the poem is that in the final analysis, the passing of time and poetic segments is itself an illusion. What we actually get is a history of repeated antiblack violence. Calvin Warren calls this temporality “Black Time”: “a time without duration; it is a horizon of time that eludes objectification, foreclosing idioms such as ‘getting over,’ ‘getting through,’ or ‘getting beneath.’”6 Black time is marked by a “horizon of violence” that “fractures the vectors of temporality” into “an infinite array of absurdities, paradoxes, and contradictions.”7 (59). In “The Mistress Attempts to Instruct Her Slave in the Writing of a Poem,” if Jeffers invites the reader to engage in the intricacies of reading an incomplete history with our own insights and perspectives, Jeffers’s “Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” draws the line. At last, in controlling the direction of our reading, Jeffers reminds us that some facts do not leave room for apologist interpretation. Jeffers’s contrapuntal poem embodies this temporality and performs its fracture through the line-breaking, punctuating articulations of violence. This history of fracture, expressed in fragments and visual splinters, is shattering. There is perhaps no better word to describe the intellectual, psychic, and emotional experience of reading the many formal experimentations of Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis.
And yet, what is most surprising is how the sheer formal inventiveness connects with archival virtuosity to also impart a sense of possibility and freedom verging on joy. In the final coda to The Age of Phillis, Jeffers connects her own book’s project to that moment when, as a child, she was first introduced to Phillis Wheatley. She writes:
To my teachers, the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley was the first of the firsts, a beacon for black children . . . . Neither of my parents liked (or respected) her poetry much, but that wasn’t the point. The point was loyalty to the race, to African American men and women.
This “loyalty to the race” and to undoing the injustice of forgetting a potent African American foremother seems to drive Jeffers toward a project steeped in formal virtuosity, both fertile and lively. Alongside structural and formal echoes from Tyehimba Jess and Robin Coste Lewis, Jeffers engages in a powerful citational praxis, seeding her poems with lines shared from a century and a quarter of African American and Afro-Caribbean poets and their poetries: Elizabeth Alexander, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, A. Van Jordan, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, M. NourbeSe Philip, Natasha Tretheway, and Afaa Michael Weaver—all of whom are explicitly credited in the volume’s extensive endnotes. Claiming Wheatley Peters as root to a powerful family tree, Jeffers’s formal engagement breathes possibility and intellect, vulnerability and strength, linguistic tour de force and Enlightenment racial consciousness into the lacunae that remain in Wheatley Peters’s own story. As a result, The Age of Phillis brings Wheatley Peters’s life and poetry into connection with the African American poetries of the present day. In this sense, it is Jeffers herself who is serving as griotte across three centuries, and we are the ones to whom Wheatley Peters is revealed and her legacy healed.
ENDNOTES
[1] For more on Wheatley Peters’ subject position and her art, cf., Tara Bynum, “Phillis Wheatley’s Pleasures: Reading Good Feeling in Phillis Wheatley’s Poems and Letters,” Commonplace: the journal of early American Life, accessed March 13, 2021, http://commonplace.online/article/phillis-wheatleys-pleasures/.
[2] Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 48-50, 80-85, 213.
[3] Isaac Chotiner, “Inside a Texas Building Where the Government is Holding Immigrant Children,” New Yorker (June 22, 2019).
[4] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 5.
[5] Tyehimba Jess, Leadbelly ( Seattle: Wave Books, 2005) and Olio (Seattle: Wave Books, 2016).
[6] Calvin Warren, “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness” The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, R. J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen, 55–68 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 56.
[7] Warren, “Black Time,” 59.
