2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTESY OF BARBARA TYROLER
10
Jaki Shelton Green’s poem i want to undie you is at once a visual and textual invocation of her ancestors and a visual and textual lament of her daughter Imani’s passage into the ancestral river, into the physical, visceral landscape of her family: “the genetic complexities of your death bear roots. unravel. implode. graft themselves into continents oceans volcanoes of blood-stained bones that will not un-die.” This book is a powerful representation of a mother’s grief delivered by one of “the Writingest State’s” strongest voices. n
is heartbreaking. The use of anaphora creates this emotional response in the reader. The repetition of “i want” in reference to things the reader knows the speaker cannot have – “i want to un-morning that morning. i want to un-break the broken of you” – in addition to the repetition of “un” in the second half of the same page – “un-sacrifice the sacrifice of you. un-erase the erasure of you” – is relentless. This is the unending lament of the motherpoet whose child has died. After this list, there is a brief moment of limbo: “for several hours i watch a straight beam of
light crossing a closing day.” The rest of the page is so blank compared to the page before that the reader is forced to pause, too. She is made to close her eyes, to take a deep breath. To really look at the corresponding photo that shows a very young Imani wearing what appears to be a cowrie shell necklace, whose face and body are obscured by four slanted rays of light as though through window blinds. When the reader finally turns the page, she is thrust back in to what the speaker wants to happen that absolutely cannot: “i want you to un-die.”
ABOVE From the Visitations Series,
BARBARA TYROLER’s composites of Jaki Shelton Green’s daughter Imani are featured throughout this chapbook. See more of her art in NCLR 2017 and 2018 and on her website. She earned an MEd from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with emphasis on visual communication and community arts development and an MFA in Imaging and Digital Arts from the University of Maryland where she studied photography and videography, then joined the faculty of the art department and taught traditional wet darkroom, digital imaging, and lens based critical theory. She is the recipient of over twenty-five arts and community development grants. In 2009, she relocated to her hometown, Chapel Hill, NC.
GIfts for Imani, 01 (mult-image composite collaboration with the Shelton-Green Family Archives Collection), by Barbara Tyroler VISITATIONS: A Community Response to Loss and Celebration, an evening of poetry and images with musical interpretation, was held at the FRANK Gallery in Chapel Hill 21 Oct. 2017. See more works from this series on the facing page.