3 Poems - Freedom: A Journal of Research in Africana Studies
Published 3 poems in volume two of Freedom: A Journal of Research in Africana Studies.
SKIN//Content: Or, Partitioning the Variance of Dreams
IDEAS//Forever
SEASONED//Counters: Or, An Ode to Good Trouble
“…you must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
These poems are from a larger collection, Upon the Body: Poems of/to a Black Social Epi. Upon the Body is a two-part poetry collection that draws its title from the above passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (Coates 2015, p.10). There public health is, right there—the graphs, charts, and regressions landing upon our bodies. The title is also a reference to the word epidemiology itself (epi + demos = “upon the people”), and the notion of embodiment: how we physiologically incorporate the outside social and material world into our bodies (Krieger 2005). In other words, embodiment describes how the world in which we live gets under our skin; how it alters our biological systems (Hertzman 2012; Vineis et al. 2020); how it literally modifies the surface of our DNA (Gravlee 2009; Kuzawa and Sweet 2009), affecting our health and well-being across our lifespan and across generations (Goosby and Heidbrink 2013; Gee et al. 2019). Yes, our own bodies remember what those of our grandmothers experienced, even if we forget—or never knew. Our bodies breathe in, process, and tuck away the stress and toxicity of racism just the same as PM2.5.
The collection as a whole is crafted as counternarrative to public health’s ahistoric, apolitical, racist, and homophobic proclivities in times of crisis, weaving public health themes together with Black music, poetry, literature, and history to (re)frame/analyze dual pandemics while centering love, resistance, and (re)memory (see Petteway 2023a, Petteway 2023b, and Petteway 2022). The 3 poems published here are from PT. I, which traces my roots as a Black social epi(demiologist)—from Booth, Alabama (birthplace of my great Aunt T in 1918, rest in power 4/27/20) through the Civil Rights Movement, to sundown towns in West Virginia, to segregated rustbelt cities in the Midwest, and forward through 2020—drawing from generations of creative resistance produced and embodied by Black artists, activists, and scholars like Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Audre Lorde, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. DuBois.
IDEAS//Forever
summer stars
concealed by sparks
from a front room
tears singed
as wings of fireflies
push through
thick air of darkness –
who will light these humid nights
to starve these flames
forever
mend our burned palms
so we can grow
futures
from the fertile ash
left beneath
our nails?