Signifying Pain Chapter Eight

Chapter 8: God Don’t Like Ugly: Michael S. Harper’s Soul-Making Music

In this chapter, Harris explores the writings of Michael S. Harper. It is likely that I have read something by Harper somewhere in my readings but his name does not come to mind when I list poets. Harper writing from the African-American experience much as one of my favorite poets does—Patricia Smith. As I read this chapter I ached to grab my books of her poetry, of relating what Harris is saying to what I have read between the lines of Smith’s verse. But time is precious and demands other things of me.

Harris shows how, through the rhythms of jazz and tradition, Harper exposes the too fresh scars that America too often ignores:

America has a wound; the wound is self-inflicted. A sutured wound will heal but may leave a scar. The black man who is subjected to humiliation and servility is another refrain in the long epic of a country’s progress bridled by prejudice and oppression. One cannot wash one’s hands of it or make it clean by liberal mind-set or proxy. The infection must be gradually cut back, defiled. And so it is true with the legacy of segregation that continues to plague democratic ideals and fills urban ghettos. Indeed, America needs a witness. Sorrow is not borne alone, but is toiled through, creeping its way into sound. (155)

America needs a witness. And America is not alone. Everywhere there are atrocities conducted on a national level. In every neighborhood atrocities are condoned on a community level. And behind many closed doors, the scream of abuse is heard, ignored, or silenced in sobs.

America needs a witness because America is a nation living in denial. We self-help our way through life, hoping to become better. We numb ourselves with narcotics—drugs, alcohol, television.

Indeed, memory and pain are at the heart of Harper’s poetry whether writing from
personal experience or from collective experience (158).

Why the “or”? Why “from personal experience or from collective experience”? Is not the reason Plath’s poetry is so powerful deeply embedded in the fact that although person other women recognize themselves in what she wrote? Is not the deepest personal writing not also the collective voice crying out? Or do we still want to believe that this is the exception, each time an exception, this one the exception?

Recently I watched a brief interview with a father of a boy who had raped a girl, the father saying how the girl had gone around boasting about being sexually active, claiming that she had had some sort of party that . . . justified? Dare I say it? Isn’t that what I inferred? That he was somehow blaming the girl for what his boy did?

And what is wrong with a world in which an eight-year-old boy is accused of raping an eleven-year-old girl?

Pause and really think about this. Eleven. Eight. Children. Rape.

America needs a witness. And it is still tempting, so damned tempting to shut my eyes and ears to eleven and eight year old children living in their world of violence. Denial. Or witness.

All it takes is one voice.