Camille Rankine "Necessity Defense of Institutional Memory"

NECESSITY DEFENSE OF INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY

So the free may remain free

say the nightmare
the dream

so we are preserved

he who believes takes a life

so a life may be saved

the girl becomes an object

so the greatest devastation occurs

let go her fingers their slim cleave

so I may be replaced
by a machine which in its violence behaves
more like me

the longer you live the more these lies
come alive

so the past splits in two:

one stays in the past and dies

one past shape-shifts walks with you

Honestly y’all, I was going to skip this week because I’m supposed to be packing, but every time I open my phone to do a lil downtime scrolling I keep getting confronted with the ever rising chaotic violence of this moment. There’s the federal agents kidnapping protesters in Portland, and forcing them to sign documents saying they will no longer protest in order to be released. There’s the Black celebrity trying to turn “coon” into some snappy acronym, really Terry? Theres Naked Athena and this baffling proclamation that a “western vagina” will save us all?! I am still waiting for an explanation of what the hell a “western vagina” is by the way. 

As you might imagine, that low hum of dread that’s been buzzing since quarantine started was getting really really loud, but fortunately I was saved by this quote from James Baldwin that the poet Joy Priest posted on twitter. 

“The poets, by which I mean all artist, are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only the poets...It sounds mystical, I think, in a country like ours and at a time like this, but something awful is happening to a civilization when it ceases to produce poets, and what’s is even more crucial, when it ceases in anyway whatever to believe in the report that only poets can make.” (“The Artists Struggle for Integrity,” 1963.) 

Fortunately, we have not stopped producing poets, and so I thought, let me get back to this work and see what the poets have to report about this moment we’re in, because somebodies got to make it make sense. And by “make it make sense” I mean someone’s got to put all this into social historical and emotional context for me, because if I tell you one of the things that I struggle with as I watch the discourse of this moment is how ahistorical and narrow minded we can be as a culture. I swear folks be out here putting on blinders like those race horses, and be acting like, well all I see is this moment right here right now and I shan’t look at all the other back story and surrounding information. And like thats fine if you’re a Black girl at home trying to enjoy watching the Bennet sisters find they husbands without wondering about the probability of Mr. Darcy also owning a plantation in one of them British colonies in addition to half of Darbyshire, but it does not work for our current political moment. In fact, its high key how we got here in the first place. 

I could rant for days about this mess, but I’d rather talk about Camille Rankine’s poem, “Necessity Defense of Institutional Memory.” I came across this poem while reading Camille’s first book Incorrect Merciful Impulses. Returning to it this morning I realized a lot of my frustrations with our discourse is really my frustration with our institutional memory. A frustration this poet validates through her subtle exploration of the dangers of institutional memory and the belief in its necessity. When I approach the opening to this poem one of the things I’m most struck by is what is not said. Camille puts so much trust in us as readers right from start, “So the free may remain free,” she writes trusting us to hear what is sublimated underneath so the oppressed remain oppressed or to ask but who are the free. 

Very quickly this poem asks us to choose how or where we locate ourselves within it. Are you among the free and the “we” that gets preserved? And what does it mean to be outside of that freedom and preservation? The unspoken duality in those lines is fleshed out in the couplet between them “say the nightmare is/ the dream.” Here we see the tension between the two realities, between the American Dream and the violence and cruelty perpetuated on the people who try as they might are never meant to attain it. The line break in that couplet is wonderful, “say the nightmare is” she writes, allowing that sublimated voice to insist on their reality, that it not be erased, that it not say be turned into another story of say the antebellum south with those happy slaves that loved their oppressors. 

The form of the poem on the page further emphasizes this duality between dream and nightmare. The lines swaying back and forth across with that alternating indentation work as a sort of call and response or cause and effect. So “this” can happen “this” happens or is sacrificed. And so we see the danger of the preservation in the effect it has or in the violence that is necessary to maintain it. “He who believes takes a life.” And again in the couplet that follows there’s the reality of those who live the dream, a life saved, and the reality of those who live the nightmare, the girls inevitable objectification. Yet that boundary between dream and nightmare seems to collapse in the lines that follow.

so a life may be saved 

the girl becomes an object 

so the greatest devastation occurs 

let go her finger their    slim cleave   

The realties of violence begins to appear in the left column of the poem, starting with that “greatest devastation,” where before there had only been freedom and preservation and safety. It makes me think of something I read about the federal abductions in Portland being the natural evolution of ICE abducting immigrants while they were at work or going to pick up their children from school or at school themselves. All of which started well before Trump I might add. What they’ll do to the most vulnerable among us they’ll do to any of us. As is often the case all of our preservation and freedom and safety is only an illusion if we are not fighting to protect and defend everyone. 

By the time we reach the center of this poem we are all made complicit in the violence of institutional memory. Where we might have been left space to negotiate our relation to the “we,” “he,” and “girl” earlier in the poem, with the shift to the imperative in the line beginnns “let go her fingers” we are held quite firmly in place. We, the readers, are the ones releasing the girls fingers, failing to protect her to keep her reality from becoming a nightmare. And my lord how we are convicted by the word choice that follows the caesura “their slim cleave.” The particularity of slim fingers giving us the image of a young child’s hands, and then that word cleave doing so much work as meaning both to cling and separate. Taken all together we can imagine this child clinging to us even as we separate from her to live out the dream and make our selves mute to the reality of her nightmare.

Finally, the end of this poem, that very heroic feeling couplet, says so much about where we are now. The past feels so much at once alive and dead, doesn’t it? We are constantly denying and reliving our history. Fascism is taking over, we are marching for Black lives, people are being abducted, people are being murdered in broad daylight on camera, people are being lynched. We are idolizing the Wall of Moms joining the protest for Black lives as if Black mothers haven’t been at the center of this movement from its inception, as if we haven’t been watching them for years on camera begging the police to stop killing their babies. It’s hard not to have an eery sense of  déjà vu.

I often leave this poem wondering how much we are bound to this shape-shifting undead past that walks on with us. I’m not sure we can ever escape it, but if its possible, if there’s a world where we can see the past without the rhetoric and revisionism that allows it to shape-shift, erase and perpetuate violence in the present, then I think poetry and art is the way we’ll learn. 

Camille Rankine is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, was published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press. She is also the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, she was featured as an emerging poet in the April 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine and as one of Brooklyn Magazine’s top 100 cultural influencers of 2017. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, Octopus Magazine, A Public Space, The New York Times and Tin House. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The MacDowell Colony, and was named an Honorary Cave Canem fellow in 2012. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University's School of the Arts, she chairs the Board of Trustees of The Poetry Project, and co-chairs the Brooklyn Book Festival Poetry Committee. She is a visiting professor of creative writing at The New School and lives in New York City.