Nicole Sealey "In Defense of Candelabra with Heads"
IN DEFENSE OF “CANDELABRA WITH HEADS”
If you’ve read the “Candelabra with Heads”
that appears in this collection and the one
in The Animal, thank you. The original,
the one included here, is an example, I’m told,
of a poem that can speak for itself, but loses
faith in its ability to do so by ending with a thesis
question. Yeats said a poem should click shut
like a well-made box. I don’t disagree.
I ask, “Who can see this and not see lynchings?”
not because I don’t trust you, dear reader,
or my own abilities. I ask because the imagination
would have us believe, much like faith, faith
the original “Candelabra” lacks, in things unseen.
You should know that human limbs burn
like branches and branches like human limbs.
Only after man began hanging man from trees
then setting him on fire, which would jump
from limb to branch like a bastard species
of bird, did we come to know such things.
A hundred years from now, October 9, 2116,
8:18 p.m., when all but the lucky are good
and dead, may someone happen upon the question
in question. May that lucky someone be black
and so far removed from the verb lynch that she be
dumbfounded by its meaning. May she then
call up Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads.
May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.
Every time I’ve heard Nicole Sealey, author of the chapbook The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named, and the full length collection Ordinary Beast, read the poem “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’” I have wanted to press rewind and hear it again. This was particularly true the first time I heard Nicole read this poem at Mass Poetry festival in 2018. That particualar reading took place in a lecture hall at some large museum in Salem, Massachuesettes, and like anything Massachuesettes puts on the audience was predominantly white, which is, if I’m honest, the reason I left Boston though I really did love it as much as I’ve loved any city I’ve lived in. In most scenarios I really do hate to be the only or one of very few little brown dots in a sea of whiteness. After the 2016 election, when I had been invited to read to a very generous if tipsy crowd of well meaning white people, who all proceeded to apologize to me personally for dtrumps election as the single representative of colored peoples present. I decided to no longer allow myself to be alone among white people I didn’t know and alcohol, which is honestly a good way to operate while Black in America. Yet, despite all my qualms about being alone in white spaces, on this day when I shuffled in among the masses to hear the then Executive Director of Cave Canem read from her first book, and heard the last line of this poem “May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.” I knew I had been in the right room at the right time. I knew I had been blessed.
“In Defense of Candelabra with Heads,” begins so conversationally that unless you are deeply familiar with the original poem it defends, which is also by Nicole, you have no idea that a blessing is coming or from where. “In Defense” begins with a description of the original “Candelabra with Heads” which is an ekphrastic poem or a poem about a piece of art and takes its title from the sculpture it is responding to, which was created by the artist Thomas Hirschorn. The poem compares the sculpture to images of lynchings. When the poem “Candelabra with Heads” was originally published in Nicole’s chapbook the editors convinced her that the thesis statement “Who can see this and not see lynchings?” was unnecessary. This poem explains why it is.
The defense of the original poem begins with a reference to a line from William Yeats “a poem should click shut/like a well made box.” However, rather than describing the way the thesis of “Candelabra with Heads” “click[s the poem] shut” she describes instead how it clicks open by inviting us into the realm of the Black imaginary.
“I ask, ‘Who can see this and not see lynching?’
not because I don’t trust you, dear reader,
or my own abilities. I ask because the imagination
would have us believe, much like faith, faith
the original “Candelabra” lacks in things unseen.”
First, I must say I love the way we are addressed as “dear readers” here and how it maintains the intimacy established earlier in the poem with that “thank you” for having read the poem as it appears in both books. This intimacy is important, because the poet is asking us to trust her. She is saying it is safe to dream, to have faith, to leave room for what “the imagination would have us believe,” though history may make mockery of our faith.
It feels important too to note that we are speaking in this poem of a faith “the original Candelabra lacks in things unseen.” A faith that was edited out at the advice of well meaning editors who perhaps didn’t appreciate the scope of the poets vision for her poem. A faith the poet nevertheless nurtured and maintained and defended for us publicly, offering, by example, a reminder to trust ourselves, and our vision for our work. (ok let me hop off my soap box and get back to the poem)
The faith, the imagination, the hope this poem invites us to have is not blind to reality. After all Nicole is quick to remind us how we learned “that human limbs burn/like branches and branches like human limbs.” Her description of lynch fire “which would jump/from limb to branch like a bastard species/of bird” echoes the peculiarity of Billie Holidays “Strange Fruit,” the metaphors in both texts showing how human cruelty can make perversions of nature.
Yet even despite the long bitter history of violence against Black people Nicole is able to create a speculative world “A hundred years from now...when all but the lucky are good/and dead” where Black Americans are finally free from this trauma. She writes,
“...may someone happen upon the question
in question. May that lucky someone be black
and so far removed from the verb lynch that she be
dumbfounded by its meaning. May she then
call up Hirschorn’s Candelabra with Heads
May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.”
Notice how, with this shift into the speculative, the poets language shifts too, and becomes in some ways incantatory. May this may this may this the poet says calling forth a world that does not yet exists, as if through magic. Every time I have heard the end of this poem read aloud, even when I am just home alone reading to myself, I cannot help but “get happy” as the old folks would say and if I am home alone I cannot help but lift my hands in praise in recognition of this poet’s power. She has imagined a world where Black girls and women like me might live more freely, where we might bring with us our minds and not be bound by what history tells us is true, but by whatever world we might dare to make for ourselves. That is a blessing I can receive, and echo with a resounding and enthusiastic Amen.
Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize.