In the poem “Watch Us Elocute,” Marcus Wicker writes, “So I’m at this party right. Low lights, champagne, Michael ...” My mind instantly fills in the line break. Michael Jackson? Michael Jordan? Michael Brown? Here I am, a black man presuming the range of possibility for another black man’s poem. The poet finishes “... Michael / Bublé.”
The politics of expectation are cuffed into Mr. Wicker’s stunning second poetry collection, “Silencer” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.99). The book’s dedication page reads, “For all of us,” which in turn asks: Who is us? Is it all lives? Is it all black people? Is it uniting the reader with the poet? The “us” is an invitation that Mr. Wicker weaponizes, implicating the reader as audience, assailant and agent.
In the opening poem “Silencer to the Heart While Jogging Through a Park,” Mr. Wicker writes, “Surely, I don’t have to tell you there’s a gun,” wherein the line shifts depending on who inhabits the role of “you.”
The you could be a white reader who assumes the black man in the park is dangerous; or, the you could be a black reader who assumes what the white gaze assumes.
There are as many possibilities as there are eyes to read this. The flexibility of the line re-enacts how a black middle-class Midwesterner must be conscious of the self, the white expectations of the self, and then manipulate both for his survival.
But the speaker of these poems does not desire mere survival. The speaker seeks the splendor of the suburbs — The American Dream. With “an eye toward the big guy’s / wallet,” Mr. Wicker’s poems code-switch between a battle rhyming black archetype (importing lyrics from Drake, LL Cool J, Kendrick Lamar) and “ivory theses.”The poet allows an old white man to “called me his / boy.” A white woman microaggresses, “Gosh, you’re just / so well spoken!” and the speaker clinks champagne flutes in agreement.
It is the sublimation of the self for the safety of the suburbs.
Recognizing that this is distant from the dominant narrative of American Blackness, the speaker asks Tupac, “But Pac, what would you do / for love in southern Indiana?”
In “Prayer on Aladdin’s Lamp,” love begins as basic need and evolves into middle-class materialism, progressing from “shelter & bread” to a tenure job and a 401(k). These desires provide “room & board / but the cost is blood.”
One might instinctively read “Silencer” as a critique of the white social elite, but critique would position Mr. Wicker as the victim of his circumstances.
To the contrary, Mr. Wicker proclaims, “I love the cul-de-sac” in “Morning in the Burbs.” There is no righteous indignation or militant resistance here. Rather, the poet participates in the party. The poet will “desire badly” badly suggesting the urgency of desire, the way materialism warps desire, and desire’s ineffectiveness at truly changing our surroundings. Regardless of want, the world and the expectations it places on you are out of your control.
The poet asks, “what’s the use / in playing it like everything’s going to be OK for me / in the event of mortal catastrophe… Please allow me simply to keep wanting.”
Black people have so many ways of knowing death and still we choose living.
There is agency in choice; it implies an active desire rather than a passive subjection. “Silencer” explores the consequences of desire in a world that expects your ending before you are able to finish your line. Where desire leads: suburban wealth, and its comfortable casket.
Dave Harris is a poet and playwright from West Philadelphia. He is a Callaloo poetry fellow and a San Diego fellow in playwriting at University of California San Diego.
First Published: November 19, 2017, 1:49 p.m.
