Commentary |

on Sons of Achilles, poems by Nabila Lovelace

Any work of art that aspires to meaningfully render the subjects of social violence and aggression must wrestle with their omnidirectional nature. The conventional wisdom that suggests hurt people hurt people implies that no being exists exclusively as the receiver of violence — that the violence we are ourselves subjected to easily becomes the learned behavior that we manifest towards others. This battle royale aspect — ducking a punch from one direction only to immediately throw one in another — of life on our blocks and in our homes is what Nabila Lovelace attempts to communicate in her debut collection Sons of Achilles. As one of the book’s opening epigraphs (a lyric from famed Queensbridge rapper Prodigy) states, “there’s a war goin’ on outside no man is safe from.”

In this formally alacritous collection that repurposes elements of Greek epic and tragedy, yes, it is the men — the “sons of Achilles” — who feature as the primary aggressive actors. But, again, you may have missed the nuance of the book’s commentary on violence if that alone is what you take away from reading. Look to the book’s other opening epigraph, from Derek Walcott, as guidance: “Since I am what I am, how was I made?” Positioned over the text, this question functions as the lens that focuses readers’ attention not on the milieu of male violence but the “I” — a female-identified speaker — being “made” within it, if not also becoming part of it. Following a proem, the collection leads off with the eponymous “Sons of Achilles,” whose whipping opening lines concisely illustrate how the collection’s speaker cannot position herself in simple opposition to warring she observes and negotiates:

 

If I think like the boy I take into me, then I know why
the blood appears. I am an apprentice in a city named,
Kiss The Hands Who Kill

& Achilles is the father. His sons crawl out war
with fully loaded hands. I meet Achilles & the streetlights

hush.

 

Sonically, two stanzas are stitched together by the echo of “kill” in “Achilles,” and in a similar way, we see the speaker joined by sensuality to the violent progeny of the heralded warrior. Is accepting a violent actor into one’s body the same as accepting his violence? (Does it make the speaker “think like” him?) Possibly, or to a degree. Can one be both apprentice and victim of violence? Certainly — less a contradiction and a more a confirmation of the nature of social violence. It is simply a matter of what these dynamics look like for each individual (and, in this case, a young female speaker coming into her own in Queens / New York / America), and that is what Lovelace is often focused on illuminating. In the case of this speaker, her biological father is absent — which we learn in poems such as “Return to Sender” (“Daddy does the leaving but our browns / match”) and “Still, I Don’t Love My Father.” The symbolic father, though — Achilles — remains a constant and present influence, and one that speaker even beckons at the close of this opening poem:

 

Achilles, deathless man void moonshine, I cut

my veins and see his name. His sons rampant: melodic. Sweet

 

Negotiations. Love

the violence that births you. Hate

 

the chirp of the birds you eat.

Love me too, father. Love me.

 

The daughter opens herself to find Achilles within — his name coded into that which often marks his passing, blood. With this image, Lovelace foreshadows a shift from being besieged by Achilles to being known as one who carries his violence within her, one who would contemplate hardening herself to earn the “love” she begs of him.

It is worth noting a consistently bracing formal aspect of the book: Lovelace’s use of strong opening line breaks. The first above excerpt from “Sons of Achilles” is one example. The unit of language and meaning created by the opening break (“If I think like the boy I take into me, then I know why”) firmly introduces the idea of complicity and lack of innocence regarding the “wars” surrounding the speaker. Some other examples include the openings of “Practice” (“You are 7 & a mother / in training”), “Veterans Memorial Drive” (“I am not a woman / excited by war”), and “Hourglass” (“A father exists, but not / much”). In the first poem of a series titled “For Songs & Contests,” Lovelace writes “Anwar / taught me to throw hands before / I traced my name in clay […]. the only girl with hands, / knew my job. One jab / would not do — I learned / to hit in sequence.” “Hands” being vernacular for the efficacy of one’s fists, we see here a return to the realities of this speaker’s learned (maybe even necessarily so) violence. The description of the blows, though, also speaks to — one might argue — the way Lovelace employs lineation most effectively: an opening line cut sharp like a stiff left jab, followed by a right cross of a next line that rings the reader’s skull. This happens more often in the collection’s more conservatively structured poems, invigorating their pace and rhythm. There are, however, moments in the collection —such as “Roan Beauty & Charger,” which is a poem built upon a brilliant conceit — when comfortable stanza structures such as couplets allow the punch of the individual lines to limpen. (Roughly half of the pieces’ lines lead off with prepositions or articles that leech momentum — musically and linguistically —from the poem.) But the formal decisions in a poem like “Roan Beauty & Charger” stand out in this book only because everywhere else Lovelace’s attention to lineation and her innovation with form (the revealing, and difficult to quote, “Exorcism” being an exemplary example of the latter) prove thoroughly engaging.

Before moving away from focus on lineation, let it be noted that the opening line of “Roy Wilkins Recreational Center” is almost a gut-wrenching poem unto itself: “The boys play ‘Ignition,’ & the girls dance.” “Ignition,” likely the then popular remix, is a meat market anthem of hetero male sexual conquest by Robert “R.” Kelly (with the actual lyrics “I’m ‘bout to take my key and / stick it in the ignition,” which could be simply corny and not predatory save for the fact that they are preceded by “sippin’ on coke and rum / I’m like so what I’m drunk / it’s the freakin’ weekend, baby / I’m about to have me some fun”). The poem’s opening line captures the how the song and the venue recreate that sexual meat market as well as how inescapable all the pressure of sexualization is for these newly minted teenagers at this “celebration for 13 years old boyhood.” Immediately following that opening enjambment, Lovelace goes on to deftly undercut and complicate the poem’s presiding tension by offering a window into the competition between desires inside the young speaker’s mind:

 

the only way 2003 allow — the bottom half

Of my cornrows slapping my back. The thick braid
reminding me of what is mine & what is added.

Long hair because Alicia Keys has long hair
& I think she is the most beautiful girl &

I kissed her CD once before I fell asleep but right now
we are dancing & dancing to the words of Robert

who croons a deep thrum into the Rec center.

 

The characterization of Kelly’s voice as penetrating should not be considered any less intentional than the amplifying ampersands that bookend the line in which the speaker details her infatuation with the singer Alicia Keys — a queer counterpoint to R. Kelly’s aggressive lyrics. In this poem, sexual desire and sexual agency become the battle royale’s combatants. An unsolicited touch on the dance floor jolts the speaker to recall a a boy who flashed his penis in the lunchroom: “How his face held no shame, // how the way the girls talked I thought they wanted to be / the penis rather than the hand.” All of this associating and contemplation of “what is mine & what is added” takes the reader back to the Walcott epigraph, to the questioning how this speaker is made, and of what. In “Roy Wilkins Recreational Center,” we again see the collection’s speaker parrying salvos of aggression (sexual) with jabs of her own introspection. And while the speaker and all the girls in the poem appear to be prey inside this arena, the poem end with R. Kelly — the “Pied Piper” — and his music leading the children away from innocence while “every girl sings every word.”

This collection ends in a difficultly honest place. Speaking to ColumbusAlive.com about her initial engagement with the Iliad and the figure of Achilles, Lovelace says “something that stuck out to me was […] its celebration of this heroic figure who is the hero because of his acts of violence.” In the collection’s penultimate poem, “On Knowing,” our speaker opens stating “I, too, come from the lineage & loins / of Achilles” — finally and fully claiming the aggression within her. But unlike Achilles, women, and brown women in particular, are not afforded the same space to be combative and aggressive. (Examine the way Serena Williams was punished for aggressively advocating for herself in the 2018 US Open finals if you disagree with that point.) While there are poems that explore vulnerability, such as “Sharing Cake,” in the latter half of the book Lovelace creates space for justified female anger. In the above mentioned “On Knowing,” the “lineage” the speaker laments includes convicted serial rapist Ofc. Daniel Holtzclaw, who preyed predominantly on poor brown women in Oklahoma. The speaker desires to “urge the machete / across the width of him,” and would not she be justified?

 

I see Daniel — envision a shield fashioned
for me by a God — I see so many black girls.
Consider me. Consider me.

 

“Consider me” as one of those victimized black women. “Consider me” a child of Achilles with the same capacity for violence as Holtzclaw. What Lovelace shows is the self now meeting the self in the battle royale — the I that asks “what else speaks better than / the pooling of blood” versus I who apprehends “what else / is my greatest fear, but that I too/ am capable of this carnage.” It is interesting how leaning towards violence makes the speaker tactile but also undoes her personhood. The final poem in the “For Songs & Contests” series concludes (and notice the work Lovelace’s line breaks are doing) “I was called /Anwar’s little / cousin. / Once I didn’t have / a name / at all. Who are you / if not boy / & brazen?” The speaker as violent actor is no more than “Anwar’s little” — an offshoot, an echo — and the closest she gets to having “a name” is “cousin.” This erasure by embodying the violence of the Achilleses and Anwars creates such a meaningful contrast with the collection’s closing poem, “Untitled.” Think here of untitled as referring not only to the poem as an artwork but whether or not the speaker possesses a name. In this final piece, the speaker drunkenly contemplates giving the hands to the abusive husband of a neighbor only to ultimately decide against blood:

 

you exit Caroline’s house,

her husband & sons behind you.
Your name Nabila

means noble. The door closes behind you,
where is your name now?

 

In the moment when she could most righteously repurpose the violence she has inherited, the speaker must painfully accept that the choice is not that simple. Daughter of Achilles or not, she is on the losing side of all the power dynamics established and maintained by his Achilles’ sons.

Speaking of Lovelace’s poetry in the previously cited ColumbusAlive.com feature, writer and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib suggests “[she] writes the way that she speaks […]. There’s a real beauty to the way that she puts together words.” The latter assessment is evident throughout Sons of Achilles. The former, though, may be a hasty privileging of the vernacular she uses over the way it is phrased. A recurring challenge of reading this collection is that there seem to be a number of moments when the syntax is clipped to the point of feeling gristly to the eye or ear (in other words, not the way one might expect to hear another casually speak). For example, the prior quoted close to “Sons of Achilles” includes the phrase “Achilles, deathless man void moonshine.” Whether that is a string of metaphors with the commas cut away or a deconstruction of “devoid of moonshine” is unclear. (And the two impart different meaning.) Maybe these moments are gestures towards influencing patios and pidgin syntax, or possibly a grammatical manifestation of what one might do in a fight — moving in a herky-jerky manner to avoid giving an opponent an easy target. The aesthetic benefit remained unapparent after multiple reads. The best of language in this book reminds me more of a heavyweight fight — power punches, close quarters without a lot of dancing. As challenging as some of its subjects may be, Nabila Lovelace has written a debut book you will be better for standing with to exchange blows.

 

[Published by YesYes Books, June 15, 2018. 80 pages, $18.00 paperback]

Contributor
Kyle Dargan

Kyle Dargan’s most recent poetry collection is Anagnorisis (2018, Northwestern/ Triquarterly). He is the Assistant Director of creative writing at American University in Washington, D.C. and a contributing editor of On the Seawall.

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