I read this book a few weeks ago and have been meaning to review it, but honestly? It’s hard. What can a white, cisgender, mostly hetero woman add to this conversation? Nothing. So I won’t try to do that, but this book is beautiful, passionate, and heartbreaking, and I just want you to read it. Instead, I’ll tell you how I came about this. I upped my GoodReads challenge with the goal of adding more chapbooks. They’re short and cut you open much faster than a novel does. Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems caught my eye recently when I was questing for the best chapbooks.
There is no way for me to say this without sounding as ignorant and privileged as I am, but I feel like it’s important not to shy away from hard conversations just because I’m afraid I’ll sound stupid. It’s okay to not know everything, and it baffles me that so many people don’t seem to get that. It’s the last day of Black History Month, and leap day (I love leap day), so here it goes:
When I found out I was going to be an aunt I was instantly excited to school my nephew on the world of books. I know, I know. He wasn’t even born yet. Mega nerd. I had visions of us in blanket forts reading Harry Potter as I watched his face take in all that magic. He’s turning one in April, and although I’m not a baby person, he’s the clichéd joy of my stupid life. I spend hours making absurd noises and singing Baby Shark just to make him smile. It’s completely ridiculous and I reckon it’ll only get worse. I digress.
The point was that when I pictured myself reading books with him there was this other scenario that slowly emerged. I realized most of the books I wanted to share with him were written by white authors. My nephew’s a glorious shade of not white, and I pictured his little face looking up at me and asking why all the books we read were written by white people. It made me realize how limited my own library was and how I wanted to change that before we started reading together.
It’s only in recent years that pressure has really been put on the publishing industry to make room for marginalized voices. Little kids need role models they can relate to. If all the heroines young people of color encounter are white, then what damaging message does that instill in a child’s psyche?
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Smith’s book:
Two boys are in bed on a Tuesday afternoon & neither knows the other’s name for they just met this morning on their phones & were 1.2 miles from each other & so now lay together & one boy reaches his bare hand inside the other, pulls out a parade of fantastic beasts: lions with house fly wings, fish who thrive in boiling water, horses who’ve learned to sleep while running. he pulls out beasts, one by one, until all the magic is gone & the gutted boy turns into a pig. pig boy & boy spend a day with no language & the boy, hearing no protest, splits the pig open & crawls right in, & the pig, not one to protest, divides in half & lets the boy think he split him. when they’re finished, they dress & part & never forget what happened. how can they? the boy’s still covered in pig blood, the pig’s still split.
Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems
