Represent Our Resistance: A Reading of Teeth, A Reading of Resistance

“…If anything I do, in the way of writing novels or whatever I write, isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it isn’t about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private exercise of my imagination…which is to say yes, the work must be political…” – Toni Morrison (“Rootedness: Ancestor as Foundation)

The pilón is in her hands again, and she remembers more the mashing of garlic…

I thank God for el Mercado, Santurce,
where we filled our bags.
I thank God for the chopped translucence of onions
above which we poured oregano & salt.
& I thank God for yellow oil in the pot,
the buckle & hiss of heat under a pan…

In “Scent: A Love Poem for the Pilón,” El Mercado, filled bags of onions, oregano, salt, the heat of cooking, the hands of the young girl working beside her mother at the table in the kitchen—all these instances of living and surviving “still lingers there.” And like the pilón, the poet, Aracelis Girmay gathers them in a collective to bring forth an image, lasting and as strong as the scent of garlic. Choosing to remember the memory of the work of a woman and a girl, of a kitchen, of a home, of a market, of an earthly substance, is to choose defiantly to privilege the connection of earth and humanity, and defiantly to resist erasure.

You might wonder why an article about poetry in a political journal such as the Black Commentator? This is about cultural subjugation and resistance and not an exercise in literary criticism. The subjugation of a people, as I have tried to teach my students, begins in the realm of culture with stories of chivalric conquest resting on images denoting a degenerate people, a subsequently enslaved people, a colonized people. And all of it the work of an indulgence in the violence of narrative privilege. Political, social, and economic policies, subsequently, accommodate the narrative that privileges the conquerors. The realm of culture, however, is also the site of resistance, that is, joy. But the site of narrative conquest is also the site of resistance. The memory of the pilón dares cultural subjugation! It reminds the poem’s narrator, to use John Henrick Clark’s phrase, of her “human beingness,” her connection to humanity and to nature. In turn, this memory of “human beingness” grants the narrator the right to conjure words and images in opposition to those forces that would seek to denigrate her. A political collection of poetry, Teeth, depicts the process by which we recover the cultural subjugation of humanity.

…Fine Beth in the kitchen at home.
She don’t know I’m hanging here
Like fruit from a tree…
God said, ‘Drink the water.’
& I just drink the water.

Thus, the gift of Girmay’s work is her commitment to conjuring the myriad ways in which the enslaved and colonized resisted dehumanization and exploitation. We hear in the work the voice of a Black woman daring to challenge the deadness surrounding us: “I pray for this to be my way: sweet / work alluded to in the body’s position to its paper.”

“Epistolary Dream Poem After Finding a Schoolbook Map,” the last poem in Teeth, speaks of the multitude carried on the shoulder of one sojourner. Re-discovering a “fold-out map from an old geography / book,” the sojourner/poet/narrator (re) traces the departure from Mexico of her granddaddy, Francisco Vargas who stops in Georgia where his “Dumas-Davis woman,” “tall & wide as a mountain” is found. They take a train to Chicago where later “their six long babies” bloom. In Puerto Rico, another granddaddy journeys to California, falls in love with “La Santa Barbara” who “could dance / sweet & strong as azucena” and who could “make / a red dress look holy at Sunday Mass…” Beyond the Americas, “my people come from Eritrea, mountains / tumble into valleys, desert, sea. See / how it swells & how it booms…”

Like her ancestors who “come from Eritrea, mountains / tumble into valleys, desert, sea. See / how it swells & how it booms” to bring forth “sun’s children” in Iraq. From Africa, to Central American, to North America to Iraq, the sojourner/poet narrator’s identification and commitment to the oppressed will not allow her to consider the Iraqi people “the enemy.” The first poem, “Arroz Poetica,” speaks of the suffering, the dying, and the death of the familiar. Her “enemies” are not those “hungry” or “standing in lines / for food, or stretching rations / or waiting at the airports to claim the pieces / of the bodies of their dead.”

“Hassna Ali Sabah,” Ibrahim Al-Yussuf,” and the “sons of Sa’id Shahish” are the names of people the narrator will not forget, for she thinks on them when she sees her 12 year old student or when she remembers that her own sisters were 12 once. She will not forget to open every one of her “windows” and call their names:

This is how I feel as I turned the pages of Teeth. I am “going somewhere,” but it always feels familiar. We fall but we rise still in the memory of the “horn of Miles or the soul of Aretha,” “the poetry of Langston, the rap of Tupac,” and the “caged roar of Huey,” writes Larry Pinkney (Black Commentator – Issue 241). Indeed, there is something special about the resistance of the once enslaved and colonized people of the world. I encourage you, the reader, to continue the struggle with Teeth!