Poem of the Week | April 04, 2016
Cortney Lamar Charleston: "Melanophobia: Fear of Black"
This week we offer a new poem by Cortney Lamar Charleston. Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have been published (and are forthcoming) in numerous literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Fugue, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, The Journal, Pleiades, Rattle and Southern Humanities Review, where he was a finalist for the 2015 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize.
Author’s note:
“Safe space” is a term I often hear in socially conscious, activist-oriented circles. It’s a concept that has weighed on my imagination, in no small part due to the fact that by modifying “space” with the word “safe” we are implying that space, singularly, might be inherently violent, if it is not certainly. Space, in physical terms, is something to have conflict over, and it can define the boundaries of where conflict takes place. I think about this often in regards to anti-blackness, both historically and in the present. I think of white flight. I think of gentrification. I think of divestment of economic and social capital from urban neighborhoods. I think of over-policing according to the boundaries of neighborhoods. I think of segregation and the death it never had that makes such tactics possible and effective. But beyond such physical interpretations, space defines the boundaries of conflict metaphysically as well. I think about this often in regards to anti-blackness, both historically and in the present. I think of the space between words and actions on the part of our political leaders and the policies they craft. I think of the space between rhetoric extolling equality and justice and the cold, hard math scratched into prison walls or tallied at the city morgue. I think about the space between fact, which is measured by cold, hard numbers, and truth, which is measured along emotional and spiritual wavelengths. I think about the space between my body and someone else’s, and how it can be so small and so large at the same time; I think about what lives in that space. The poem expounds on this and all of the above.
Melanophobia: Fear of Black
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