Poetic Conversations: Specters in the Light ~ A Review of Enzo Silon Surin’s “American Scapegoat”
Is there a place where black men can go
to be beautiful? Is there light there? Touch?
Is there comfort or room to raise their black
sons as anything other than a future asterisk,
at risk to be asteroid or rogue planet but not
Comet… — Enzo Silon Surin, “When Night Fills with Premature Exists”
Recently, I’ve been transfixed with transcendence. Reading Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, and having recently visited the “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I’m beginning to think about transcendence within the logics of racialized oppression. As McKay’s novel contemplates the intimacies of Black male interiority in a white supremacist society, the Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the Met visualizes that interiority and considers its affect and essences within frameworks of freedom. “Dark Rapture” (1941) by Beauford Delaney is a portrait of his contemporary, writer and intellectual James Baldwin, depicted seated in a forest scene, rapt in pinks, yellows and soft blues. He looks peaceful. I stood in front of the portrait and thought about Jake, the protagonist of Home to Harlem, whose propensity to take up and leave for another sun is one motif of flight that suggests a deeper desire for escape — the escape of the soul to an above-ground where his being is uninhibited from the nether-world overrun by the -isms. The escape of Jake and of James by way of McKay and Delaney are like specters in the light Enzo Silon Surin forces upon the state-sanctioned enclosures of Black men in American (and greater western) society in his latest poetry collection American Scapegoat (2023).
Surin’s fourth book of poetry contends with a landscape in which the lattices of oppression that have long inflicted Black people since the inception of America. Surin pays particular attention to Black men made to stand on the fraught fault-lines of the country, made targets for violence in the mundane, and raises the contentious feelings of wanting to be free whilst bound to the physical. Surin injects the collection with celestial motifs, often imagery and allusions to stars, galaxies and the vast expanse of space. Space, then, is seen as an allegory for the expansiveness of the color black, and thus the endless possibilities of diasporic Blackness bound and unbound from domination. The folktale of the “The Flying Africans” undergirds this possibility, and Surin’s play with the sky in juxtaposition to landscape in relation to the machinery of the gun, the surveillance of the state, and the murder of the marginal. This is a place that is hostile.
The transcendent quality of Surin’s poetry in American Scapegoat ultimately conducts a survey of the atmosphere for racialized subjects, which is imbued with the thick afterlife of slavery, Christina Sharpe’s phrasing through the metaphor of ‘the wake’ and ‘the weather,’ both of which Surin also takes up in his flirtations with the heavens in conceptualizing being above it all for Black people. With the mingling of this ‘spirit-scape’ and landscape, Surin’s method of transcendence comes in the shape of the aperture, indicating modes of escape, self-imposed exile even, from the enclosures of the -isms endemic to American life, life in the west, and life under empire.
The aperture, this site of exit through which transcendence can come, is actually brought into a contention. Offsetting part III of the collection, Surin invokes McKay’s desire for more by quoting his most well-known poem “If We Must Die” — “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” An expression of resistance is a call and response across generations of confronting racial violence. Resistance invokes the ‘push back,’ to enact action in gaining access to the oft-elusive site of human rights. However, in recent years, the treatment of resistance has been reconfigured to think about modes of inaction and refusal as just as productive in fighting back, and has inspired much creative expression on such practices as hurting the capitalist structure that perpetuates the exchange of confrontation. Surin’s contemplations on the upward and outward expanse as viable for Black flourishing comes at an impasse with McKay’s charge. This is a moment of tension, another transfixation of my thoughts. I wonder if Surin means to take on that tension in generating a new through-line to poetic praxis in transcendent thinking, but a part of me feels more sure in McKay’s image of being pressed against the wall, no longer dying as the tear in the American fabric is made for my oppressed person to exit.
