"The Afterbirth"

I have been thinking about poems lately. Not poets. Just poems. I realize that poetry is often like food for me. I like to have a good diet with enough roughage, greens and meat. But I have an emotional connection to some foods and surprisingly the foods that I have fond memories of are not always the unhealthy foods. Poetry is like that for me. I know that some poems are good for me, and some poems are dear to me for various reasons. So I am thinking randomly of some of the poems that I seem to return to.
Nikky Finney’s “The Afterbirth” appears in her book Rice, a beautifully designed book of poems filled with daring poems of painful eloquence by Finney. Rice was Finney’s second book of poems, arriving some ten years or so after her first book was published in the mid-eighties. Remarkably, the book did not win the interest of a US press, but was published by the exceptional Sister Vision Press of Toronto, Canada. As part of the promotional drive of the work, Finney was distributing small burlap bags full of rice—all very tasty and effective. But it is the poetry that is still most powerful, and the poem “The Afterbirth” remains a haunting presence in my imagination.

It is a narrative poem—a long narrative poem—that tells the story of the birth of her father. But it also tells the story of the death of his mother and much more, so much more. Finney has mastered the rare art of using language to elevate story into something profoundly musical and epic. Yet the genius of this poem, for me, is the way in which it represents both a confession and a lament at the same time. It reveals that the tragedies of race in America and everywhere else, are never clean and clear matters of good versus evil, but a complex and human realities that ultimately reveal the flawed nature of all humans and our profound vulnerability in the face of bigotry. Here is the thing: a woman in the 1930s, a black woman, a black, ambitious woman from a black ambitious family with hopes of moving towards the status of the middle class, with commitment to see that their children are educated and are able to seize hold of the elusive American Dream; a black woman from Carolina stock, a recent descendant of the enslaved, is in labor, ready to give birth to her child. The family has known the rituals of the black folks for years, the rituals of birthing, the rituals that would bring clear-eyed women to the beds of the pregnant, women with the capacity to guide a child into the world while preserving the womb and the body of the pregnant woman. They know that this is what poor people have done for decades, for centuries in America’s south because they have had to. But these are modern people, and they have seen that those who can afford it, those white folks who can afford it and those black folks who want to afford it have had doctors visit the woman to bring the baby forth, and they think that perhaps this is what ambitious black folk should do.
The tragedy at the center of the poem is how horribly wrong all of this goes. And we read this unfold with a knowing sense of dread, but with a feeling of despair at our helplessness, their helplessness, the helplessness of a people wanting better but somehow forgetting the meaning of better. A white doctor is summoned, a young white doctor who arrives drunk, and who enacts a careless rite that leads to maiming, and that leaves the mother with the afterbirth still in her womb where it cankers.
I remember when I read this poem how much it moved me for its difficulty of emotion and idea. I remember how alarming it seemed to me that such a story could exist, and yet how completely reasonable it was that it happened and why it happened. Finney’s management of this story is a beautiful example of her force as a poet, but it offers lessons to writers, especially to young writers. She reminds us that sometimes a poem is about moment and that there is something noble about a poet who is determined to write a poem only if the poem is saying something, is hell bent of offering some “meaning” some value, so idea. When moved by such a poem, some people suddenly become suspicious, skeptical and cynical. They fear being manipulated, duped, somehow by the emotion of the piece.
It reminds me of a scene in the recent film The Queen, a film that I think offers an impressive study of a certain kind of English aristocracy. In the scene, the Queen is making a speech on television about the late Princess Dianna. She has been pushed into doing this by the public outcry and the nudging of Tony Blair. In one moment, a cluster of staffers in the Prime Minister’s office is watching the speech. In the foreground is one of his advisors, a somewhat cynical man. Behind him are the mostly women and a few men of the staff. The advisor snorts, “Well, isn’t that rather over the top”. The camera then pans the faces of the other staffers as the man slowly turns to look. They are all in tears. He is embarrassed. He slumps in the chair and grows silent. It is a comic moment, and yet a wry commentary on sentiment and moment.
But Finney’s poem is never maudlin, never trite, never sentimental in an indulgent way, but it is a tough and troubling look at America and at family. I comeback to this poem a lot.