Robin Coste Lewis

Later, when people asked us,
Where did you come from?
We could only answer: Water.
from To The Realization of Perfect Helplessness by Robin Coste Lewis

Leaving one’s place of birth casts you adrift. You feel unmoored for a long time, uncertain if you will even take root in the new land. And if, like so many millions, you find yourself once more on the move, seeking a place where you can flourish, it feels like your whole heritage is but a journey.

As a girl, leaving my home was devastating. As a wife, frequent moves left me without a sense of home. I imagine my ancestors, lurching across Europe as war and civil unrest rose up, sailing across the ocean to escape deportation to Siberia.

Since girlhood, I wanted to connect to those who came before me. I loved to open the cheap travel case where Mom kept photographs. I have those photos now. Few who appear in those black and white images are still in this world.

When I opened the box that held To The Realization of Perfect Helplessness, I was awestruck by it’s weight, by the solid beauty of the book. Amazed to see pages of photographs and words printed in white on perfectly black pages. I instinctually knew this was a special book, presented with meticulous care.

The poetry presented with photographs that Robin Coste Lewis shares from her grandmother’s collection had a visceral impact. I was distracted by the faces and figures, the beauty and mystery there, so that on second reading I steeled myself to stick to the words only.

There are so many lines that stuck in my head.

“The way that Time keeps knocking/on my bedroom door, the way/that Death lets her in,/the way that Life pours the tea.”

Lewis addresses Mathew Henson, the African American who first reached the North Pole, hired to be Robert Peary’s valet. The son of free blacks who migrated to escape the Klan, his mother died when he was young. At age twelve he became a cabin boy. He never forgot hearing Frederick Douglas speak. He went with Peary on an expedition to Nicaragua, and trained with Inuit, learning their language in preparation for the expedition to the North Pole.

“Which is to say, the moment I decided there was no such place as home, or what was once home no longer existed, that the continent of my family had been flooded, and the ice on which we had lived and thrived for generations had melted, and everyone was gone, which is to say, the moment I admitted I was living on a vast mass of floating ice–alone–the moment I accepted that, I began to feel better. I was dead, it was true, but I was happier. I stood on the new frozen shore watching the light mingle with the ocean. Everyone had become water. Land was a story the old people had told to frighten the little children, to keep us from running off.”
from The Ark: Self-Portrait as Aphrodite Using Her Dress for a Sail by Robin Coste Lewis

Lewis celebrates Blackness in these pages. She looks back million of years, considering those who came before, the mystery of the countless, faceless dead, and the reality of erasure, of inevitably joining them. “Our black/deep mystery perfect–you and me–sitting here–one hundred thousand years ago–without any possibility–or need–for documentation.”

“Just be here/with me/on this page,” she writes, calling me to be present, to be involved. I am in awe.

Thanks to A. A. Knopf for the free book.… (lisätietoja)

This book is separated into three sections. The first and third are rather traditional poetry.

The second, though. In the second section, Coste Lewis uses the descriptions on artwork featuring black female figures, and creates poems. She used descriptions from museums around the world (and cited at the end of the section). By arranging the phrases differently--into sentences, or by using similar phrases--the poems she creates vary greatly. This idea makes me think of both Travesty Generator and The Galleons: Poems, both longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry.

The third section features some poems having to do with Los Angeles and growing up in Compton. I read this book with the California Book Club, all of their previous choices have been set in California, so this one did not fit as well and was definitely not what I expected.… (lisätietoja)