Why "The Remedy" Blog?

If the title and the content of the poem "The Remedy, or, Nigger's a Book", which is a piece of art, offends you....that's good.

Let's have a conversation."

If the work offends you it may be a sign that you are awake: awake to hatred, racism, free speech, responsible speech, or a myriad of subjects and issues that this poem raises for you.

If you are my age, or read the classic book in middle school in recent years, as my children did, you may also know that Nigger,  is actually a famous autobiography by the great American, Dick Gregory.

It is also the title of a 2002 book written by Harvard Law School Professor, Randall Kennedy.

This blog is a public forum (yet with no specific names mentioned) for two specific things:

1. A place where the author of the poem at hand presents it for scrutiny, enjoyment, derision, response, or suggestions.

2. A place where the specific historical issues, books, documents, thoughts, poems, people and experiences the poem at hand was "based" on can be examined.

Background:

The background for the blog was a very charged, tense and uncomfortable situation that resulted when the author of the poem read it on an historic platform, before his peers, all of whom had spent an exhilarating week talking about what we all loved: Poetry, poems, the craft of poetry, poets, and, well, life, and the marvelous opportunities for expression, enlightenment, anger, discomfort, but most of all, pleasure, that arises from the soil and sea of Poetry that we move and live in.

What ensued during and after the community reading was, to my mind, authentic, necessary, troubling, uncomfortable, and appreciated.

Because the public reading of the poem caused a "bomb" as one person described it, and because the poet (that's me) was criticized for presenting such an obviously "unfinished" poem, and because an honorable and sincere man we had all come to appreciate that week had the fortitude to stand up in the middle of the reading and object to the poem, and because the leaders of the workshop handled the potentially explosive situation in probably the best way they could ("Ok, 5-minutes smoke break!", followed with a request, that at the end of the reading we all sit in a circle and use the experience as a teaching and reflective moment), because my poem did greatly offend some of the people in the community, because art and life and beauty and community are so vital to the health of ourselves and our common world, I have posted this blog to provide a place for those present that evening, as well as others, to learn more about the historical precedents this poem was based on, and to feel free to express themselves.

Because I also have an ego and don't at this point agree with those who found fault with this poem, as a poem, after hearing it only once, without having had the opportunity to read it, here it is. If you hate it or think it doesn't work, based on the poetics, and after understanding the specific literary allusions and historical incidents, then do me the favor of a peer and let me know why and feel free to make suggestions. Then feel free to point out examples of poems that have addressed the important topics of eugenics, abortion, racism, Hitler, and Darwin, that DO work. Best yet, write one yourself.

Why the Title "The Remedy"?

The first two words of the title, "The Remedy", come directly from the biology textbook that was at the center of the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee. Since it was probably one of the most-famous trials in American history, the actual epigram, with the date of 1914, immediately relates the poem to an historical time period.

Here is the pertinent quote, lifted from a section:

The Remedy. -- If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.

 The majority of educated peolple in the US will have some familiarity with the trial, especially since the play "Inherent The Wind" is one of the most-produced in US history.

A poem relating to historical, cultural, and linguistic issues does not have to provide specific epigrams to help understand the work. Some do, some don't. 

It also places the first use of the word Nigger in a certain era.
 

Text of the Poem

Here is the link to the text of the poem:

The Remedy, or, Nigger's a Book

(Note: The version uploaded here was a revision made during the week-long workshop. The author has not had time to post the older drafts, so the reader can see the thought process and decisions made about the lines in the poem.

Also, the text options on this blogging platform have not allowed me to post the poem in the format that it was meant to be seen. Each new stanza was meant to go further towards the right margin than the last; in this way, the idea of "evolution" going from one stanza to the other was to be indicated.)

Black Is Beautiful : James Weldon Johnson

At the Grave of James Weldon Johnson

The middle section of "The Remedy" is the core of the poem, for the author. It is where the core meaning of the word and the historical reality of Nigger is expressed. And it is directly based and influenced by the famous poem "The Creation," by James Weldon Johnson.

Then God smiled,
And the light broke, 10
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!

from "The Remedy":

The original Niggas—

now they were black,

beautiful, dark, deep black.

And when God looked down

He’d break out in a smile

as wide as Heaven's rivers are deep.

Here original harkens back to the Creation, both the poem and the act, and it makes the explicit statement, echoing the well-known phrase from the 1960's "Black is Beautiful."

Dead Black People on the Stage

A few minutes after "The Remedy" was read, a disturbed member of the audience came to the podium and expressed his profound shock over the poem. One of the comments (paraphrase, from memory) was:

"There are dead black people on this stage."

He was 100% correct. The poem succeeded in this regard if that was his response.

And while it is clear from the context of the remark that he and I were not "seeing" (as a piece of art can allow "seeing") the same dead black people on stage, the poem does conjure them.

In the context of the poem, as it clearly makes comparisons between eugenics, Darwin, coons, Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood and a vocal advocate of eugenics), and books being burned (the result of Nazi philosophy), the burned niggers at the end of the poem evoke the aborted fetuses.

The number of aborted African-American babies is more than double the number of Jews who were eliminated in the Nazi's Final Solution.

Whether or not the immense pile of dead, black fetuses are merely tissue, without rights, or actual human beings, is not the point of the poem. But yes, "they" are there on stage, in history, in fact, in my country, and in my time.

Alveda King, a niece of Rev. Martin Luther King, said of Planned Parenthood, at a 2008 protest of the NAACP:

"It has led the way in eliminating African-Americans to the point where one quarter of the black population is now missing because of abortion. Planned Parenthood is anti-life and we are here to say enough is enough!"

...in Darwin's world / shit don't matter

The sudden change in the poem, from references to God smiling over the creation of people, thus pronouncing that Black is Beautiful, occurs when we read:

in Darwin’s world

shit don’t matter.

If the fittest

must survive,

Cull’n some dumb coons

is a positive good.

As killing Jews was a positive good in Nazi Germany, it follows that a society based on the same philosophy would have no problem killing "some dumb coons." 
 
From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany was released in 2004 (paperback edition in 2006) with Palgrave Macmillan in New York, a major publisher of historical scholarship.
 
"Richard Weikart's outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society by the time of the First World War, in which the supposed good of the race was applied as the sole criterion of public policy and 'racial hygiene'. Without over-simplifying the lines that connected this body of thought to Hitler, he demonstrates with chilling clarity how policies such as infanticide, assisted suicide, marriage prohibitions and much else were being proposed for those considered racially or eugenically inferior by a variety of Darwinist writers and scientists, providing Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power." -- Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and author of The Coming of the Third Reich

Burning Niggers and Verbal Violence?

Can a poem commit verbal violence?

If that poem has violent imagery and comments that are incarnating an actual historical, and ongoing violence, does that make the poem violent?

Clearly some people who heard the poem felt that way.

As the author, I think it is important to remember this is a poem, not a campaign speech. This hastily-put-together blog attempts to justify the poem as art, and art that the author is in fact proud of.

If the poem makes one feel attacked, well, maybe it has succeeded in conveying what the people "inside" the poem are feeling. If the images in the poem refer to actual dead people, and includes historical voices of those who might be glad that the people are dead, is that not a valid poem? Does that not happen in poems throughout history?

We should not confuse the voices in a poem with the voice or beliefs of the poet.

Towards the end of our group discussion -- where many very valuable and important points of view were discussed (and which I have not the time to include here: those who were there heard them), the person who had the integrity to stand up and publicly voice his problems with the poem, eventually said he would give the author the "benefit of the doubt"

I hope this blog, as incomplete as it is, earns that benefit of the doubt from those who listened to the poem, and to those who might read it or hear it in the future.

Do not criticize me for using the word Nigger (and niger, Negroes, Nigra, Black, and Niggas, all with distinct historical meanings, several of which pre-date the 19th-Century American development of usage).

I will gladly accept criticism regarding meter, form, image, clarity, assonance, alliteration, voice, and syntax.

I do not think a poet needs to explain their poems; however, I do regret not introducing the public reading of this poem. I think if I had said "This poem deals with issues of eugenics, racism, and abortion, and it uses language that most people would find offenseive" then people would have been warned, and perhaps not as bewildered and angered as to why a member of their community had just spoken the words.

For that lack of wisdom, I apologize. In hindsight, I regret not doing that. I am a saddened because I damaged new friendships, particularly with one of our instructors that week. In our meeting, and in the discomfort and context of the moment, I did not feel it was my place to "justify" the poem, but rather to simply express what I consider the core of the poem:

The original Niggas—

now they were black,

beautiful, dark, deep black.

Love and words expressing love are cheap. For me, to say I love someone in public is not a melodramtic statement, an attempt to evade responsibility for my words and actions, nor a sentimental vaguery. In the context of the discussion, it was a way to attempt to say I respect your actions of protest, I accept your reaction to my work, and I am very sorry I have offended you. And it was a way to acknowledge the discomfort many others felt over my choice of reading that particular poem, in that particular way.

I do not accept the idea that using the word Nigger in a poem is forbidden territory. I DO accept the idea that an artist must be responsible in his or her art. I do not accept the idea that a white person cannot write about "black" issues, as though some issues pertained only to one group of people, and not all people. The specific usage of each and every use of my words was backed up with historical research, as well as personal experience after having lived in the Bronx for ten years. I was not intentionally lighting verbal fires or making verbal assaults. I was intentionally using the language of social reality, and I was using it, as I hope this blog conveys, with intellectual rigor and artistic quality.

Once again, if that artistic quality was/is lacking, then I am eager to get to work and make poems that do reach a higher level of artistic integrity.