REVIEW: Black California Gold
Black California Gold
Wendy M. Thompson
Bucknell University Press
Review by Heidi Kasa
With book banning these days, scientific and historical information erasure, violent deaths and coverups—another round of powerful people creating a general population narrative—I’m looking to poets who include history and can’t look away from cultural truths. I’m drawn to poetry of witness.
Carolyn Forché’s definition of “poetry of witness” includes poets who “endured conditions of historical and social extremity.” My unofficial definition of poetry of witness: A poet looking hard at a societal issue and having courage to speak to it. It’s when shit gets real. The poet examines the issue from many angles with an anthropological process or distance, poetically documenting it. It’s literary! And entertaining! But it has a sobering quality; it’s truth-telling. Like your fierce stare at the car barreling toward you.
When rights, voices, and lives are taken away, creating a record is imperative. We can, and must, bear witness.
Wendy M. Thompson opens her debut poetry book Black California Gold by asking and answering the question: when people found gold long ago, was it on the backs of black people, Native people, and immigrants, particularly Chinese and Japanese, in California? She traces territory, both excavating familiar Bay area locations and linking an undercurrent of effects in common historical understanding, drawing her own more detailed map.
Critics of poetry of witness feel it’s too heavy, direct, or harsh. Thompson writes tension and violence, so she’s clearly facing problems, yet she writes with surprising moments of light and life in counterbalance and for emphasis. The speaker in the titular poem writes about her picture of her “father as a boy running away from the camera not unlike Matthew ‘Peanut’ Johnson running down a debris-strewn hill away from the police, arms flailing, the joy catching in the thin air pocket between shirt and skin…” This is not a book about uncomplicated black joy. Yet the speaker has moments of resistance that suffuse suffering with beauty: “They did not expect our tree to grow so eagerly towards the sun, persistently bearing fruit that grew dark and sweet every year…whose ambition flowered from buds on branches used for lynching.” The gritted teeth determination of that line conveys strength.
Thompson’s way with words cuts to the quick. “One day we knew they would pulverize us into nothing. But from the pulp, can you imagine all that paper?” The turn in that line is widening, full of wonder—hopeful of a sort. “Above all, my father has gifted me the small bravery it takes my body—a bag full of fragile dishes and nervous birds—as though it belongs in this world despite the shame of having to carry it.” An exacting description of her experience of the body in this more accurately mapped California.
What maps don’t usually hold are the events experienced in named places. The descriptions of Oakland and San Francisco, familiar to Bay Area residents, resonate because they chronicle what it’s like to live there now, in the time of climate change. Thompson includes the pandemic and fires, too, so readers living these realities feel acknowledged. She shows what’s underneath the veneer and rubble of the Bay.
The poems range in form, including prose poetry, verses, and experimental structures and lines that underscore the subject matter. In the poem, “Life and Death in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” part 3 “How we remember our dead” are a group of items contrasted with the list in part 4: “How they remember our dead.” These powerful lists juxtapose concrete items from the views of vibrant life and stark death.“We dance” compares to “Our bodies, stumbling, contorting after the gunshots, look like dancing.” In part 5, Thomas provides strong intimations: “How do I explain to them why the police killed him Howhowhowhowhowhowhowhowhowhowhowhowhowhowhow?” The word “how” is repeated, but when italicized and run together, it looks like the word “who,” which compounds the meaning of this line.
Thompson continues to play with form and tropes with innovative results. She writes in the poem “Black Southern Migrant Gifts:”
“U.S. Citizenship Test questions…TRUE or FALSE:
There was never any honey in that jar. They just told you there was and then told you it was missing to get you to confess.” And in the ending poem, Thompson writes “After the shooting, a survey arrives in the mail.”
Thompson challenges this with awful, absurd form—the perfect way to ask questions that slice us.
I visited the National Civil Rights Museum the day after reading this book. One lesson I learned there: many, many more people fought inhuman treatment than reported in American history classes. Even if it’s a thin hope, the resistance is full of unnamed and named people. Each new perspective, including Thompson’s nuanced, contextualized, and important work, deepens our understanding of the human accounting of what it’s like to be othered, brutalized, and ignored in American life and history. Other courageous authors have confronted aspects of this issue: Claudia Rankine, Joaquín Zihuatenejo, and Patricia Smith, to name a few. Thompson’s new mapping is a guide for us. Every observer is unique, but work from poets of witness builds upon each other, each voice a necessary action taken against a shadowy tide.
