Flesh memory­­, for Akilah Oliver

Drawing of Akilah Oliver by Susan Bee.
Presented at the Oliver memorial at the Poetry Project, New York, June 15, 2011. All quoted material is from the work of Akilah Oliver.

“language is a skin
memory is a skin
forgetting is a skin”

“Am I now a dead person?
Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast?”

“tell me something different”

“Things translate into memory almost as they’re happening. I mean this. I mean to rip between languages. I mean to be textured paper. I mean to walk into the terminal ocean one day.”

In 2008, Akilah sent me the manuscript of A Toast In The House of Friends, which was published by Coffee House Press in 2009. At the time, I knew Akilah only in passing so her contacting me was unexpected but welcome. Reading the ms, I learned for the first time about the death of her son, Oluchi McDonald, who died at age 20 at Martin Luther King Medical Center in Los Angles in March 2003.

“tell me something different”

“language is a skin
memory is a skin
forgetting is a skin”

A Toast In The House of Friends is dedicated to Oluchi, but also to her brother, who died at almost the same painfully young age as her son.

Such ghosts as these stay with us, as our skin, inside our brains, darkening every horizon.

“Flesh memory.”

In December 2008 my daughter Emma died. She was 23. And just like that Akilah and I had this dark presence in common, something that no one would want to have in common; and she knew that, she looked at me across time, across our very different lives, and now her ghosts were also in part my ghosts and we talked about that, we knew that, we felt that, every time we met.

“Am I now a dead person?
Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast?”

As when Emma died, the poets in and around Belladonna provide her space for us to bear and unbear our sorrow. As ambivalent as I am about poetry and communities, here was a collective – I like to call it a patacommunity – that provided space for reflection and support, where both Akilah and I were and still are connected, in flickering moments, at core.

It seems uncanny that she sent me that manuscript in the year before Emma died and that, at a time well before I could know what my own words would come to mean to me, I wrote this about her poem:

The ceremony of sorrow is performed with a measured, defiant acknowledgement that makes words charms, talismen of the fallen world. Poetry is a holding space, a folded grace, in which objects held most dear disappear, returning as radiant moments of memory’s forgiving home.

Akilah writes: “the absent visible body – writing comparable to guerilla tactics – to strike, retreat, in striking, to change the landscape, to alter the public, i.e. political, space, to force a discourse outside the script, to flip the script – the body is present in the visibility of language, in the style …”

This is the kind of poetry I want.

“Things translate into memory almost as they’re happening. I mean this. I mean to rip between languages. I mean to be textured paper. I mean to walk into the terminal ocean one day.”

I mean this. I mean to walk into the terminal ocean one day.

I mean this.

I mean this.

I mean this.