Unknowable Truths | When Death is Life-Affirming
Image description: photograph of green leaves sprouting out of the cracks in dark concrete
In The Evidence of Things Not Seen, written by James Baldwin in 1985, Baldwin writes about the murder of at least 21 Black children in Atlanta between 1979-1980:
Bring out your dead:
Edward Hope Smith, 14. Reported missing July 20, 1979. Found dead on July 28 of gunshot wounds along a road in a wooded area.
Bring out your dead:
Alfred James Evans, 13. Last seen July 25, 1979, waiting to catch a bus. Police identified Evans’s body October 13, 1980, after it was found July 28 near the body of Edward Hope Smith. Strangulation.
Bring out your dead:
Milton Harvey, 14. Last seen September 1979. Found dead November 1979. Cause of death: undetermined
Bring out your dead.
The list goes on.
In 2015, scholar Grace Kyungwon Hong writes in her book Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference invoking Baldwin’s call to bring out your dead. She lists a number of Black feminists who died premature deaths. “Barbara Christian 2000. June Jordan in 2002. Sherley Anne Williams in 1999. Toni Cade Bambara in 1995. Audre Lorde in 1992. Beverly Robinson in 2002. Endesha Ida Mae Holland in 2006. Claudia Tate in 2002. Nellie McKay in 2006. VèVè Clark in 2007. Toni Yancey in 2013. Stephanie Camp in 2014.”
Hong goes on to say “To bring out your dead is to remember what must be forgotten, to find the ‘evidence of things not seen:' that the notion of American equality in the protection of life is a fallacy, that life is not protected if you are raced and gendered, and that you are raced and gendered if your life is not protected. To bring out your dead is to say that these deaths are not unimportant or forgotten, or, worse, coincidental. It is to say that these deaths are systemic, structural. To bring out your dead is both a memorial and a challenge, an act of grief and of defiance, a register of mortality and decline, and of the possibility of struggle and survival. It is difficult to say and impossible to “prove” that these women suffered early deaths because the battles around race, gender, and sexuality were being waged so directly through and on their bodies. Yet the names bear witness to this unknowable truth.”
Moved by their words, I wrote this poem:
Unknowable truths | When death is life-affirming
I do my research
Finding numbers and statistics
Finding incidents and anecdotes
To teach workshops on systems of oppression
On structural violence
To teach workshops filled with content to
Prove
To you
To all of us
Our unknowable truths
I see a news story about the death
Of a raced and gendered person
Of a working class Asian woman
Of a Black transgender youth
Of an undocumented queer woman
I save the link
No
Actually, I PDF the page
Fearing that the story might somehow disappear
Wanting to capture evidence
Evidence of things not seen
Evidence of our unknowable truths
The unknowable truths that oppression
Not only lives in our systems
It lives through and on our bodies
Death work is life work
To bring out your dead
Is an act of
Grief and defiance
We bring out our dead
To bear witness to the battles waged
through and on their bodies
We bring out our dead
To affirm the defiant hope
In asking the question
That Valarie Kuar invoked:
What if this is not the
Darkness of the tomb
But the darkness of the womb?
*all italicized portions of the poem are quotes from Baldwin or Hong, with the exception of the quote attributed to Valarie Kuar