© 2023 Quenton Baker

Published in 2023 by

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Contents

ballast

Washing the Bones

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Note

The first 94 pages of poems are redactions of Senate Document 51 of the Second Session of the 27th United States Congress in 1842. The document contains letters back and forth from the United States and British consulates in the Bahamas and sworn depositions from the white crew aboard the Creole. It was on that ship, in 1841, that 135 American-born enslaved people revolted and were able to escape chattel slavery. It is the only large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved peoples that did not end in capture, torture, or capital punishment. There is no known recorded speech or testimony from any of those 135 people.

Washing the Bones

“The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—social and corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance. It is an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said.… It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.”

—Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

When I set out to work on this book, in the initial research phases, I had a completely different idea of where I was headed. When I read about the revolt aboard the brig Creole, the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people, I thought that I would uncover something, anything, about the 135 people (roughly, accounts vary) that were on the ship and build a work around their lives. But the more I looked, all I found was erasure; a re-writing or a dramatization at best, or a total disappearance at worst.

So I had to switch to a kind of excavation, or perhaps, retribution. Of the extant documents, and there weren’t many, Senate document 51, from the 2nd session of the 27th Congress in 1842 felt like the logical choice: to return a facsimile of the rupture; something to drill down into and break apart into a different logic. This document is primarily made up of depositions from the white slavers on the Creole and correspondence between the United States and British consulates on Nassau. I think I would say I had no choice. Beyond the very limited material on this revolt to begin with, once I encountered the Senate document and read the kind of erasure and obliteration replicated in it, I don’t think I had any other option except to use it as the text for this project.

Simply put, it made me angry, and I wanted to do something with that anger. Rage and anger and violence are byproducts of living in an anti-black world. There are only so many places that I can put it that won’t get me killed or harm someone that I don’t want to harm. But when I read this Senate document, I wanted to harm it. I wanted to visit a certain kind of violence upon it. And so I did.

I wanted to cause hurt. Not toward the reader but toward the text. A kind of habitable hurt, a violence you could live in. There are people in the document, but they exist as object. They are referred to by the white slavers or by the white diplomats. The leaders of the rebellion are sometimes mentioned by name. But there is nothing approaching an I, nothing internal, nothing in anyone’s own tongue (of course even if it were present, it would be under duress).

I see the Senate document both as a text and urtext, in a sense. It is an original (and, of course, profoundly unoriginal) blueprint of the kind of obliteration that happened/happens to the slave. The slave does not exist; the slave is non-being; the slave occupies the object position of the socially dead. So a document like this Senate record, even if it did have the voice of the enslaved, couldn’t actually contain them; they would always be buried beneath it, or rather they’d always be the negative space that made the text legible and coherent. So it was less about uncovering or excavating or speaking for or finding, because that would be impossible given the condition of the slave. It’s unknowable. But I could listen for echoes, imagine what could not be verified, and that’s how I think of these poems: as echoes, as ghosts, as penitent imaginings. The I’s that appear are a kind of resonance or reverberation that sounds when you strike a blow, when you tear apart a text like this.

Another vital consideration for me throughout this process was audience and language. What does it mean when your only visibility to the archive (or to the world at large) is through your pained body, your death, your unjust and early end? What does it mean to live in-between all that? The monstrous reality of a perilous life, balanced against the normal/ mundane/wonderful things that can happen in a human’s day-to-day existence. Caught inside social death, or non-being, but of course you’re fully alive to your loved ones, to your community. And it all matters. You can’t elide or omit any of it, but neither can you pretend that a portion is the whole story either.

So my consideration of audience and language are tied to that double life. I want black folks to feel seen, understood, in all of that complexity that comes from life on the knife’s edge. But it still is life. We’ve built it; we survive in it; we make the uninhabitable habitable. And I think that’s the project that I try to attend to in this book. How to make this alien and terrible world that requires our death habitable. How to celebrate our survival in it without limiting us to only our survival. How to address trauma without reenacting it, or give life to the thinking that makes up the totality of who we are.

Of course, I don’t decide who interacts with my work, but I think my consideration begins and ends with black folks. Because of the nature of the work, I don’t think I can really imagine audience beyond that. Because my main considerations are harm (as in not doing it) and redress (offering it, however flawed it must be). If my goal is to avoid the fraught, dangerous semiotics of English in regards to blackness, and it is, then that takes all of my attention and whatever linguistic skill I might have. Working in this language, one that is so heavy with terrible hooks into and from the white imagination, which is thick with so much horrible history and harm, so much layered danger in terms of associations, I feel like I have to clean my words, wash my bones, before I can present them properly.

The other main focus for this project was time. It’s both linear and not, temporal and atemporal simultaneously, similar to how blackness exists outside of time yet also structures chronology. The erasures are absolutely structured by whatever time existed on the Creole and are dealing with the echoes of those 135 people, but also those structures affect us still and bleed out beyond any attempt at chronology. The second section of the book exists in whatever time currently structures black life, which both is and is not the structure crushing those on the Creole. Nothing is clean or clearly delineated in this type of world-spanning non-being.

Part of my goal for the book was to collapse the distance between those two seemingly distinct periods of time, to lay one over the other like two tracings of the same horrible glyph. And that was an animating force for me. How to live in the midst of these colossal, terrifying, and yet ultimately insufficient acts of liberation and meaning-making. The atemporality comes from the fact that, of course, we still live in these survival choices. We can’t escape a world that has codified black non-being, but we also can’t fully live in it, because our humanity is conditional and obliteration looms.

For example, there were 135 enslaved people aboard that ship, and only eighteen were involved in the revolt. We don’t/can’t know how many of the 135 knew and declined to participate or if they just weren’t made aware. We have no way to make an inventory of their decisions. But we do know that five people elected to stay on the ship and return to New Orleans. And perhaps more than the eighteen that took control of the ship, those five have stuck in my brain. It’s impossible to understand decision making in the face of an obliterating horror as complete as chattel slavery. We’ll never know why those five people chose to return to the United States, but it illuminated a larger point that I thought was really important to the project. It’s easy for us to look at something like a slave revolt and think of it as a positive story, an end to captivity. An escape. But it’s an escape taking place, still, within an anti-black world obsessed with capital, enabled by a different colonial power through absorption into a different colony.

So I wanted to occupy the interiority of those decisions, and the similar ones that black folks still make on a daily, hourly, moment-to-moment basis. Not to report on it, or to make it plain to a world that doesn’t deserve to see it, but to simply acknowledge its (and our) existence. As a testament to us, to black life, black meaning-making as we live life under constraint.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of excerpts from this book have appeared in jubilat, Poetry Northwest, the Offing, Small Po[r]tions, Splinter, Poets.org Poem-a-Day, the Rumpus, Pinwheel, the Volta, and the James Franco Review. A portion of the redactions were also published as a chapbook with Paul Hlava Cebal-los and appeared in an exhibition at the Frye Art Museum.

“negroes exist for the throwing” is from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

“not new to a knower” is from Amiri Baraka’s “The City of New Ark: A Poem of Destiny.”

“unlatched braid of heat and frost” is from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath.”

“antibird, we sing like birds” is from Nathaniel Mackey’s Nod House.

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About the Author

Quenton Baker is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. Their current focus is black interiority and the afterlife of slavery. Their work has appeared in The Offing, jubilat, Vinyl, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. They are a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust. They were a 2019 Robert Rauschenberg Artist in Residence and a 2021 NEA Fellow. They are the author of This Glittering Republic (Willow Books, 2016) and we pilot the blood (The 3rd Thing, 2021)

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