Along with the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, the murder—a lynching—of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas on June 7 1998 drew renewed legislative attention, at national and state levels, to hate crimes as a distinct legal category. In response to his killing, that underrated American poet Lucille Clifton also composed one of her finest among many excellent poems:

jasper texas 1998

i am a man’s head hunched in the road.

i was chosen to speak by the members

of my body. the arm as it pulled away

pointed toward me, the hand opened once

and was gone.

why and why and why

should i call a white man brother?

who is the human in this place?

the thing that is dragged or the dragger?

what does my daughter say?

the sun is a blister overhead.

if I were alive I could not bear it.

the townsfolk sing we shall overcome

while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth

into the dirt that covers us all.

i am done with this dust. i am done.

“i am a man’s head”: preposterous, but a voice recovered, a statement of being, and an invitation to go along with the imagined circumstance. By letting the fiction announce itself so baldly and boldly she avoids a poem that riddles; we are not being asked to figure out where the voice comes from, as if the post-mortem monologue were a punchline. “Go with it,” the first line says; “i am a man’s head,” and the name of the man is left unsaid; we know it from the title, but the head does not say it because it is the identity as a human being, rather than the identity as a particular human being, that needs to be given its due in a crime that eclipsed humanity, that reduced the victim to a thing (as the poem later acknowledges). “Go with it,” the first line says, because there is no way to speak about what happened that does justice to the crime. “Go with the fiction, accept the fiction, because the fiction might help us see; play along.”  Fiction clears a space for authenticity; what happened to Byrd is so horrific as to be the stuff of an imagined tragedy, and to do justice to what it might be that he would say on it, and to justly ponder what his voice might say—knowing that there can be nothing that it does say—requires we clear away the impossibility of the actual. This clearing is itself a political act: if the actual makes certain forms of impossible, we must turn to fiction.

Something else happens in the second line: not simply fiction, but wit. It is characteristic of wit to announce itself as a game, as an exercise of the powers of make-believing, achieving concord out of discordant elements. It revels in discerning what-might-be within the occasion of what-is. The fiction of the poem is that the dead speaks. The wit of the poem, in the second line, is the reconciliation of part and whole, death and life, silence and voice, and also power and impotence, political life and total exclusion from politics: “i was chosen to speak by the members | of my body.” The dead man’s head is speaking for the body dismembered as it was dragged along a road by a pickup truck for three miles (his body was left in front of a Black church).  

Wit, usually associated with comedy, grows from within tragedy here—that the poem does not feel heartless, but instead serves as a rebuttal of heartlessness is the mark of the poem’s success. This in part because of what motivates the wit, which is a necessary longing: to imagine the dead speaking for himself, to imagine the dead man as whole and alive, and, in the conceit of body and body politic, to imagine that he might speak politically. Here, in macabre caricature, is democracy in action: that the head of the murdered man must be chosen, could be chosen, separate from, but still a part of “my body,” is possible because of the dissolution of whatever bonds might be thought to adhere among members of a community. We are asked to recognize that, as a matter of fact, nothing was “chosen”; and to say it suggests that what we conceive of as freedom of political choice is determined by violence inflicted on the political body of its citizens outside of the legitimized political system (though in the United States, the so-called legitimate political has protected terrorism against Black citizens, among others). 

We are asked to see the wrongness of the wit: this wrongness is a part of its game, and the wrongness of wit itself on this occasion is likewise a part of the game it is playing. The dismembered body can only be made whole by being turned into the wrong sort of political entity. Byrd ought to have been himself a part of a larger body politic capable of protecting his rights; instead, the wit reconstitutes him as a political body in himself; he is granted political recognition, made a political entity, but he is not granted political standing under laws that could, in aspiration, serve justice. Political orders depend upon some claims that might be called fictional, that rest upon conceits of participation and unity, and that draw upon narrative invention; but the displacement of those fictions onto the body of the man makes a travesty of what they purport to be. The obscenity of his death becomes the obscenity of the political order into which his body is reassembled by Clifton’s wit. 

In their order, the questions of the second stanza, moving from “brother” to “human” to “thing” descend from the thickest political bonds to the most exploitative. They are, in governing fiction, questions that Byrd might plausibly ask; but the conceit of the poem—Byrd speaking at all—is transcended without being erase d. These, after all, are questions that Clifton as well as Byrd might ask. They are first-person singular from Byrd’s perspective, but they could have been voiced by any number of persons—Clifton included—in response to his murder. Even the final question, “what does my daughter say,” devastating as a reminder that he can no longer hear his daughter’s words, is a question that might be asked by any living parent, anxious about how the daughter will respond. Whereas in the first stanza, the political was figured in the gruesome wit of the dismembered body/body politic, the head “chosen” to speak for the body, these are genuine political statements: they are questions that are both intensely first-personal and that adhere to more than one person. In asking these, an individual could be said to be thinking for himself or herself, to be thinking for others, to be thinking consistently—the three criteria of public reason in Kant’s political philosophy.  The implication here is even broader though: think for oneself, think for others, think consistently, and think for those who have suffered injustice and violence, who, being voiceless, can remain susceptible to the imaginative reach of the living: to poetry.

The word “think” is misleading in what I’ve written. It would be truer to the poem to say: “question for oneself, question for others, question consistently, and question for those who have suffered unjust violence.” In their form as questions that meet these criteria, they are political—and public—but, more surprisingly, situated within this poem, they are even more decidedly political. The usual question about questions is whether they seek answers or whether they seek to make a point, to answer themselves, or to assume that in being asked, the answer will be recalled, or the superfluousness of asking will be revealed. When Yeats asks “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” he is not seeking the glib reply provided by Yvor Winters, “choreography.” Instead, he is suggesting helplessness; we need not answer because the question signals the impossibility of answering. But when Clifton’s Byrd, in language that echoes Yeats, asks “who is the human in this place? the thing that is dragged or the dragger?”, the question can be answered, and the answer depends on the political order in which we live. It is not exactly a question without an answer, and not exactly a question that has an answer that we are being asked to supply; we are not being asked to supply an answer to the question at all but being asked to recognize that the society that has murdered Byrd is one that permits such questions to be genuinely asked. The proper response is to redress the social injustices that lead to the question being genuine. The question does not dismiss the prospect of answering but it invites us to see that any answer we offer cannot be true for the circumstance: of course, it’s the dragged who is human, but then he was dehumanized; in a sense it’s the dragger that has assumed the place of the human exercising power of the body of another, but this power is itself inhumane, the dragger a monster. Something similar happens with the first question, “why and why and why | should I call a white man brother?”  On the one hand, there is some ideal of political unity that invokes brotherhood as a political value, but that ideal has itself been betrayed here; on the other hand, there is no answer adequate to the question, no answer that can be given to Byrd as he lies dead. 

Poetry cannot ask questions that receive a response from an auditor; if it engages a reader in a conversation, a poem cannot hear what is being said. For this reason, questions in poems are often null, troublesome for readers and poets alike: to perform the problem, why ask if there is no prospect of an answer? Undoubtedly questions can be an incitement to the imagination. Baudelaire, for instance, is a master of such incitements, as when he asks his readers whether they’ve noticed that the coffins of children and old women are often the same size; the answer is “likely not”, but now they have. In the case of this poem’s questions, the questions are themselves unsure of whether they seek answers, or of how they even could be answered, and they draw attention to the circumstances of asking, to the conditions that validate their ambivalent status. We might say that these are questions that, even within the fiction of the poem—even in the world that the poem represents, and not the world that we share with the poem—are suitable for poetry: they are questions that not only cannot be answered, but that would fail if they were decisively answered, or if they were taken as necessarily containing their own answers. Being asked at all, they want to be heard or read as a poem: an utterance that has no intended performative power, and that is deaf to those who hear it (able only to anticipate their responses), but that discloses, indirectly, the circumstances of life that justifies what is being said. Part of Clifton’s poem, these questions are also Byrd’s poem within the larger poem that she has composed of his words.

The central stanza—Byrd’s poem within the poem as it were—is without wit: it has the bleak and exposed pathos of tragedy in its purest form. But the second stanza does not have the last word and wit reappears as the third stanza opens. “Blister” converts the “bliss” of heaven (the son, not the sun) to a festering wound; even this, the hope of faith, is abandoned. “Overhead” is a sardonic reminder that it is a head, torn from the body, that speaks. “if i were alive i could not bear it” is very nearly funny; it might elicit laughter if there were any who could laugh. But the humor is tempered, the pain admitted, by “bear it,” where “bear” suggests a weight that is not that of the sun and its light, and where “it” opens to all of life itself; and that immensity of fortitude that the world requires, unspecified but registered, overwhelms the winking self-knowledge of “if i were alive.” 

The release is from suffering, but also from politics:

The townsfolk sing we shall overcome

While hope bleeds slowly from my mouth

Into the dirt that covers us all. 

i am done with this dust. i am done.

The lines are resigned without fatalism and liberated without loathing. “The townsfolk sing we shall overcome” does not disdain the townsfolk: they sing, they endure, they persevere, and they hope. This is what they do, and it is offered as a statement of fact, something that happens as a matter of course, set against suffering. What we might expect is for Clifton to drive home some sort of irony, as if it were perverse that they could do so while he dies; crucially, to the poem and its politics, that is not what happens. “While hope bleeds slowly from my mouth” suggests instead that hope is the blood of life, that to live is to hope, and also, if we take the hope bleeding to be the poem he utters, that this poem is composed of hope and language that once sustained life. “Slowly,” in slowing the cadence of the line, in opening the mouth to accommodate its vowel sound, is itself the hope that bleeds. “While” registers simultaneity and contrast, but not to opposition. In fact, he and the townsfolk are alike in finding life in hope and hope in life; their contrast owes to his dying and their living. Being done with hope, he is done with life, and being done with life, he is done with the hope that is a political ritual of singing—instead, apart from the living, he bleeds out this lyric poem. We are, he suggests, already stained beyond remedy, already dead in life: “Into the dirt that covers us all”: his blood passes into the soil, but his words, bleeding slowly from his mouth, pass into the dirt that is not just the soil, but the world and life. “Covers us all” jars against “We shall overcome,” returns us to “overhead,” to the inevitability of being pressed under, always and already. Against “the dirt” is “this dust,” most obviously the body, but also, I think, history, even time itself, since “dust” is a byproduct of this latter, a residual cast-off, the waste that composes the lives of too many, to which the lives of too many are reduced. 

The lines allude delicately to Lamentations 3:29: “Let him put his mouth in the dust—there may yet be hope. ” But Clifton’s poem opposes Lamentations 3, which opens with despair before turning away. 3.1-2 : “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light” But then 3.22-24: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness; ‘the Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore, I will hope in him.’”  But “hope”—existential and political alike—are denied by the end of Clifton’s poem. It is an extraordinarily pessimistic work, but like Shelley’s “England in 1819,” which I wrote in an earlier post, it relates hope and politics at a level deeper than a political slogan: its indictment of the world’s political failures is inseparable from its indictment for the world for corroding hope for the future. As in Shelley’s poem, the political and poetic imagination orient towards the possibility of a future with meaning, rather than the meaning of a particular future; hope is an act of imagining not this or that outcome—that would be wishing—but a future that itself has meaning and meaning that has a future prospect. When Clifton’s poem rejects this, it rejects politics and poetry alike: “i am done” brings both to a close in silence. It is the silence of death, involuntary, unwilled, exhausted, but it is uttered here with relief and resolve, the final act of agency Clifton manages on behalf of Byrd not to condemn the world but to reject the burden of having to judge it any longer. From the perspective of politics, this is despair; from the perspective of Byrd, it is freedom.

--by Owen Boynton