who is out to kill you
This Week in Reading
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
Poetry is probably the purest form of language, words arranged in a way that is a feeling itself, instead of simply an explanation of one. This volume belongs in the present moment, each line thrums with the pulse of now, now, now.
American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin is at once a celebration and a damnation. Hayes revels over the James Baldwin’s expressive brow, over the feverish joy of blackness, while also bringing America to trial.
Terrance Hayes writes:
“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.”
What is it like to live knowing you will die? Scratch that— what it is like knowing you will be killed? That is what is at the heart of this volume of poetry. The way black life cannot be separated from black death. You cannot separate the song of the bird from the bone. To be black in America is to live under attack.
Seventeen years ago this week, an airplane crashed into the Twin Towers. My mom carefully explained it to me as she walked me to school. I was relatively unphased. I had never seen a photo of the World Trade Center until I saw the photos from that day, two skyscrapers shrouded in smoke. I do not remember a time when I did not keep my toiletries in three ounce bottles, a time before Al- Qaeda and Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction were part of our collective vocabulary. When my mother told me about 9/11 I was unshaken because I was young and did not know where New York was, but I was also unshaken because death seemed so normal. I was an eight year old that assumed that airplanes fell out of the sky everyday. It was sad that these people were dead, but I truly thought cataclysmic disaster was a daily occurrence. It turns out— airplanes do not fall out of the sky everyday, but I was not wrong. Death, tragedy, destruction are never far from reach. I am still too stupid to fear death, my mortality has always been an object of passive fascination. I am too young to comprehend what it would mean to lose the world.
I was once interviewed by a journalist who told me that my art was very combative. It was the first time anyone had described it as such and I latched on to it immediately. My art is combative, I am combative— which of course begs the question: who am I fighting? Who the fuck do I think is out to kill me? I am not sure. I could tell you myself, or society, or my identity, but the truth is less metaphoric. I have spent a lot of my life feeling, quite literally, like I could die at any moment. Much of my life has been a preparation for a fight against some kind of destruction that seemed inevitable. Now, I am more sure of my own survival; 25 years of immortality has demonstrated a resilience not so easily defeated. But still, I move through the world like someone is out to kill me.
Death hovers in the background of daily life for all of us, but it hugs closer to some people. If you are black in America you can be shot in your own apartment, dead before you ever find out why a police officer has broken through your front door. You can be shot walking home from the subway station, when you are pulled over for speeding. You can be shot, no—murdered, no— assassinated for daring to live in the world you were born into.
Black people are killed everyday and the headlines say it is a shooting. The newspapers call it an incident, or a death. They do not call it a murder. We (for of course it is a we, not a they— I stand here, in America) don’t call it murder, because we don’t want to live among murderers. Terrance Hayes does not call it murder either. He takes it a step further— this is an assassination. Presidents are assassinated. Kings are assassinated. Terrance Hayes says if he dies, it is an assassination. He will be killed, not in an act of random tragedy, but as an act of intentional harm. He will be murdered because the assassin knows he is powerful, and the assassin wants to take that power away. Terrance Hayes is saying I am an emperor, remember me thusly.
But who is this past and future assassin? White cops, slaying black boys everyday, yes. And America, a country designed to kill. Hayes lists the names of white American assassins (George Zimmerman, Dylann Roof, John Wilkes Booth), and he also calls out the white culture that acts as assassins as well (Aryans, Betty Crocker, Elvis). And he calls out the threat from within— black people using the n-word (“It feels sadder/When a brother or sister says Nigga because/It sounds like Nigger. I have never heard either/Word in the mouth of my mother or father.”) But these poems are also directed to me, the reader. Hey you, Terrence Hayes seems to say, I see you, I know you are here to kill me. I know you already have.
I Have Never Not Thought About Taylor Swift, 2018
Studio-ing
On a much much lighter note, I finished my liturgical calendar about Taylor Swift.
My statement about it, from my website:
“In my 24th year, Taylor Swift hijacked my brain and ruined my life. I thought about her constantly, unendingly. She would release a new video and I would spiral completely. Taylor Swift is an empty vessel onto which we project our own beliefs and assumptions about the broader world. Taylor Swift is the center of a Venn Diagram where one circle is capitalism, and the other is the unknowability of human beings. Taylor Swift projects accessibility and familiarity to her fans, while demanding privacy. She desperately wants attention, but bemoans it when she has it. She is the savviest media mogul in entertainment. She is both a villain and a victim; she is a snake eating its own tail. Taylor Swift is simultaneously the least self aware person in America, and the most, and I can't stop thinking about her.
I have thought about Taylor Swift so much, I feel like she has redefined my understanding of time. In commemoration of My Year of Taylor Swift, I have designed a liturgical calendar centered around the pop star, modeled after the ones used by the Catholic Church. The year has been divided into Ordinary Time and Time I Have Spent Thinking About Taylor Swift. It is surrounded by the history of the world, with Taylor Swift's birthday as year zero. The calendar tracks Taylor's romantic relationships, the cycles of the moon, and major world events. The year begins and ends on my birthday, a day on which, I was hit by a car, which I am forced to conclude is Taylor Swift's fault.
In creating this new system of time, I was forced to consider: is Taylor Swift the sun? Is she the horizon that the sun disappears behind? Is she God? Is she a careless God's careful daughter?
Do I respect Taylor Swift? Absolutely. Do I see a part of myself in her? Undoubtedly. Do I like her? Jury is still out. Will I be thinking about her for the rest of my life? Probably.“
This is potentially the most insane thing I have ever made. I taught myself Adobe Illustrator to make it for god’s sake. I always say that art is a question you keep asking yourself until you find an answer; eventually I decided that the fact that I was unable to stop thinking about Taylor Swift was a sign that I needed to make art about her. This project is an attempted exorcism, created in hope that finishing it will allow me to finally expel her from my brain and find something resembling inner peace. I will be selling poster-sized prints of these once I figure out the printing situation, if you want one.
Also my zines are now available at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, and Pop Hop Books in Highland Park, if you are local!
Further Reading
You’ve probably already read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, but if you haven’t, do.