![]() ![]() ![]() In the book's next section, "Riddle" holds a mirror up for the oppressor. In our current political climate it affirms that, yes, people are suffering all over, but not all people are suffering the same. If this biting portrayal of American death is what the speaker longs for, it is because the dehumanization of his alternative is so much more painful to face. In his speaker's insistence on dying on his own terms, Brown emphasizes the extent to which state-sanctioned murder robs potential victims of human dignity: In his chilling instructions, "I promise if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me," he gives voice to the dead, articulating the dual horror of being killed and not being able to tell about it. Interspersing explicit fears of racist and sexual violence with a more general, subtly pervasive trauma, Brown makes palpable the constant state of terror experienced by bodies socially marked as vulnerable. The racialized fear portrayed in "Microscopes" is made explicit in poems like "Bullet Points," in which the speaker puts on record that, if he is found dead in police custody, his death should not be ruled a suicide, alluding to Sandra Bland and the numerous other Black men and women who have died under similarly suspicious circumstances. Black boys are held under microscopes, broken down to their smallest parts, but never truly seen. The poem's concluding image, "A white woman walking with a speck like me," emphasizes the racial nature of the speaker's invisibility and, when read alongside the first line which describes the microscopes as "hard and black," indicates that blackness, particularly queer blackness, is simultaneously invisible and hyper-scrutinized. It underscores the speaker's feeling of insignificance within the education system and America as a whole as he learns to see himself through the literal lens of science and the figurative lens of history. "No large loss" refers literally, and comically, to the pencil but resonates broadly with the anxieties of identity and violence, whether historical or hyper-local, woven through the poem. Through those tight, locker-lined corridors shovingĮxcuse me, more an insult than a battle. To stab someone I secretly loved: a bigger boy Narrow as the pencil tucked behind my ear, lost Brown diminishes the speaker's fear as "puny," but the language with which he illustrates it, winding sentences punctuated with fragments, imitate a panic that belies its gravity: "The Microscopes" introduces a bodily fear both physical and ontological: the threat of violence set against the terror of seeing "Our actual selves taken down to a cell / Then blown back up again," the speaker's realization of "what little difference / God saw if God saw me," and, with it, his developing awareness of queer black invisibility. His perspective on the story-where he sees the threat of rape and enslavement, and the oppressive potential of faith in an anthropomorphized God-lays the groundwork for the rest of the collection, in which the individual body emerges from and contends with the collective narratives that have preceded it.įear and faith, or lack thereof, circulate in various forms throughout the book. Brown's poem rearticulates the story as a way to approach sexual assault, monotheism, and the legacy of slavery in America, concluding with the lines, "The people of my country believe / We can't be hurt if we can be bought." This reworking of a classical text exemplifies the position Brown's speaker inhabits relative to mythic, religious, and historical tradition. The poem that begins The Tradition, "Ganymede," refers to the Greek myth in which a Trojan king's son is kidnapped by the gods for his uncommon beauty. The fear permeating this impactful collection is a broadly human fear, but it also pertains specifically to the vulnerability of the black body, the black male body, and the black male queer body in contemporary America, thrusting us into our present moment while reminding us how we got here. Weaving together Greek mythology, familial and religious traditions, and the African American literary and artistic tradition, Brown aptly addresses subject matter at once universal, cultural, and personal. In Jericho Brown's The Tradition, the tradition we encounter is not of a single source but is, rather, an amalgam of traditions that compete, contradict, and coalesce in the speaker's voice. ![]()
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