The collection is broken into three sections - "inner (city) chants", "witnessing", and "(un)dressing a wound". The first grouping focuses on the experiences of growing up in a particularly poor and violence-prone area of Brooklyn. The normalized violence, the children growing up too soon, the parents doing their best in the harshest of circumstances, the crime that is a byproduct of this crushing life, and the ways that the poverty, violence, and crime are reinforced and proliferated systematically. In spite of a daily life that could and can crush the soul, there is beauty, music, love, and truth. The second section focuses on bearing witness to the social, cultural, and religious aggressions that affect women around the world and at home. The title of the collection comes from the last poem in the second section. In it, the author bears witness to, and celebrates, all women throughout time, from the era of woolly mammoths until modern times. Women have made the world, and by their work they are the measure of humanity. The final portion lays bare the pain and anger of and against women. Those things we want to cover up or cover over, that are unpleasant to talk about, the poet brings out to the wide world. The poems are loosely collected under these themes, but there is such a universality and timelessness to the themes that they really speak to any/all of these things.
My favorite poem in the entire collection comes from "inner (city) chants", and is called "limbo". It starts off with a child, living in a large inner-city apartment building, watching a boy who is dying after jumping out of a 17th floor window. The reader is lead to believe that what she's seeing could be part of a television program, until she gives you the lines "i watched his circulating tissue/soak the pavement/from up there in the sky - we weren't heaven/we just didn't have cable". The narrator goes on to describe the smells she finds in the building and uses them as a metaphor to introduce imagery for the treatment of the poor and minorities - particularly African Americans and Latinos. The narrator explains that, in her neighborhood, girls learn early that it's entirely acceptable and expected for men to sexually harass them, and the only thing that matters is what kind of attention their words give you. Essentially, men are in control of how women see themselves and each other - the locus of their identity is external and patriarchal-focused. She then spins from her young experience back to the boy who is dying, and is disgusted by the waste of violence and helplessness that ended his life far too soon. In fact, she is at his side as life leaves his body - "the i hope he knew that i saw the breath leave his chest/the amber divorce his eyes/the nike air force ones lay stagnant/after shaking goodbye/you have left/your mark, young man". She then uses this specific event as a leaping off point to discuss the relationship between humanity and spirituality, between living and surviving. She is hoping with all her might that the world she is living in is limbo or purgatory, not heaven. Because, "in heaven there is no need for blood".
I was completely blown away by the breadth and depth of the poems in My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, especially considering this is a debut collection. The raw honesty of the poems is incredibly affecting, and don't be surprised if you have to put the book down at times to process what you've just read. The poet's imagery, rhythm, and wordplay are exquisite, and combine to incredibly powerful effect. It is essential reading. If you are a grandmother, mother, daughter, son, human living in the world today, you need to read this.
Librorum annis,
