Crystal Simone Smith’s Dark Testament is an unlikely book. An erasure of George Saunders’ already odd (and sad, and funny, and majestic) novel of Civil War-era grief, Lincoln in the Bardo, it memorializes — and sometimes speaks for— the latest generation (and, in one case, an earlier generation) of Black Americans killed by American police. It’s sometimes a painfully lonely book, sometimes an act of collaboration, sometimes a persuasive attempt to animate, on the page, a real-life movement and a grief-stricken, outraged community large and powerful enough to, as Crystal puts it in her introduction, be “worthy of those who died.” Dark Testament was published with Saunders’ endorsement and a dialog between him and Crystal.
Crystal and I live maybe two miles apart, and we’ve been friends for at least a decade. We’ve collaborated on various projects over those years, including her indie chapbook publisher, Backbone Press, which concentrates on poems by writers of color. (I help out as an associate editor.) Crystal’s a rangy writer and a restless person. When we first met, she was working as a graphic designer. She’s now primarily a professor at various universities in the area, including Duke University here in Durham. She’s written one collection of haiku, and co-edited another, as well as writing a forthcoming YA book and three chapbooks of lyric poems.
Crystal has been writing about blackness and injustice as long as she’s been writing, but Dark Testament still caught me by surprise. The voices that she pulls out of Saunders’ voices are uncanny, out of time but also persuasively contemporary, often intensely lonely and austere but still agile and alert. I wanted to understand how she made them.
We exchanged questions and answers over the course of several weeks, and inevitably news of more murders crowded in as we wrote. We talked about that, and we looked at her poem in the voice of Trayvon Martin next to the passage from Saunders she carved it out of. We also talked about how it felt for her to be making her book out of a book written by a white man, what it means to be worthy of the lives these killings cut off, and what a book like this might do in a world where the killings never stop.
— Jonathan Farmer
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Jonathan: In an opening “Note to the Reader,” you mention being “worthy of those who died.” Can you say a little more about that — what it means to be worthy, especially of the specific dead — Black people murdered by police and pseudo-police you’re describing and speaking for in this book?
Crystal: When we witness these murders, our outrage is one of indignation at the lives lost, but it also morphs into a strange sort of survivor’s guilt, because there’s the knowledge that it could have been you — your son, or father, or partner. The impact is profound because it considers the human value, or devaluation, of Black people, having so long been targets of hatred, violence, and violent disregard. Lives of the victims in Dark Testament were not held in regard by their killers. There was no respect for human life, not in the heinous acts that caused their deaths, nor in the processes for justice and accountability. I think so many BLM protests are demonstrations in which the living honor the victims’ lives as worthy — not in the sense of someone who is held in high regard, but worthy of human dignity, perhaps even equal in it. And as survivors, we need to be able to hold up our own equality to navigate the trauma and the guilt.
Jonathan: You’ve said that you started working on the book a few days after George Floyd’s murder, when you started noticing passages in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo that resonated with you — with your grief and anger and fear. What was it like to find words you could start fashioning to speak for and about those killings in a novel written by a white man about mostly white characters? Did that complicate the project for you?
Crystal: The characters in Lincoln in the Bardo were cleverly crafted. They cross race, sexuality, and class lines. Some are former slaves, others include a Reverend, a racist war lieutenant, and a young gay man. It’s set during the Civil War. Because the characters were essentially dead spirits in conflict about their deaths, to me, they paralleled the ever-growing legion of murdered Black Americans that the Black Lives Matter movement tries to lift up. They were trapped in a state of mourning. So, in that way it did not complicate the project — quite the opposite. I think the universal appeal of Saunders’s book is found in the loss and mourning that are the same for us all, regardless of our societal status. Although Lincoln was the President of the country, the unimaginable grief he underwent when his son Willie died is the same grief of a Black mother or father. So the voices were easily interchangeable. I couldn’t help hearing them.
Jonathan: I’d love to see how you went about turning that recognition into these poems. Here’s a passage from Lincoln in the Bardo. This comes from a scene in which several residents of the bardo have tried to steer the living Lincoln back to Willie’s tomb, hoping that Lincoln will convince his son’s spirit to leave the bardo, accepting his death, before he’s permanently fused into the stone and vines:
Jonathan: And here’s the poem you made using this passage:
Those are eerily different, at least to my ear. Can you say a little about what you heard or saw in the original passage, and what you were listening for as you scraped away at it to create this?
Crystal: Sure. I had written several poems for other victims, but not yet Trayvon. Over the years, I’ve thought of Martin’s last moments a lot. Growing up in the inner city, I walked to the store, oftentimes alone. I remember that feeling of some stranger following behind me. I didn’t know whether to turn around, walk faster, or if the potential harm was just my imagination. The stranger would turn off onto a side street and my relief was instant. Even in Lincoln in the Bardo’s high moments, when victories seem apparent, the undertow of grief is there; the characters are dead, wearied spirits. And the melancholy dialogue that permeates the text is, aesthetically, quite lyrical. Trayvon’s last moments began to illuminate the images: in the swaying trees, the fading boy breathing shallowly. I couldn’t stop thinking about in the clearing and the moonlight shone down brightly, allowing me a first good look at his face. These images not only recalled the murder scene for me, but also how Lincoln often appeared in public, in a dark cloak and hat, not always recognizable. That seemed parallel to Trayvon’s hoodie, Zimmerman’s professed excuse for profiling and following him.
Jonathan: And were you thinking about voice here, too? There’s an austerity in your Trayvon Martin poem that sounds very different from the character’s voice in the Saunders excerpt – lonelier, more stripped down. The Saunders text is definitely poetic, as you say, but it’s not the same poetry that I find in your book. I’m wondering how you managed that – creating a new, consistent voice and style out of a very different one — while also attending to the knowledge and images you describe above.
Crystal: Many of these poems are concerned with voice. They are blackout, but also persona poems, a re-imagining of the victims’ last moments or what they might say from the grave. In the process of erasure, you’re empowered to change voice, setting, any of the original elements. Erasure in this subject matter worked extremely well because the process of hiding also reveals. In the Bardo, the living are unaware of the spirits, the spirits are unaware they are actually dead. In the reading of the text, what is known and what is unknown are important to resolve, as it should be in our society. Yet, our unawareness and respective statuses often separate us into conflicting existences.
Jonathan: That quality of separation seems fundamental. In many of these poems, I hear a terrible loneliness, someone separated not only from life but from the basic protections of having their humanity recognized and from the presence of those they love – those who love them. Just last night, Memphis released footage of the savage murder of Tyre Nichol, and once again there’s the haunting detail of a man crying out for his mother as he’s killed. But there’s also a counter-presence in this book, collective voices and collaboration — your working from Saunders’ text, the reproductions of public art works memorializing the murdered, the “we” of poems like “No Justice No Peace” and “#BLM,” among others. How did you think about balancing those things?
Crystal: I knew as I wrote Dark Testament that it would be a book with no ending. Tyre Nichols and the murder of others continue to plague us. While voices of the victims are at the center of the grief that fills this collection, there were opportunities when the existing characters spoke collectively for me to embrace the “we” — those who grieve, march, and raise awareness on behalf of the dead. That was important because though “we” grieve, our collective insistence that every human being live out their life with dignity is a consolation. Societal change, though painstakingly slow, requires many voices, like those of the street artists — their murals often depicting the victims in happy or proud moments. That differs from an obituary photo. It speaks to the cruelty. It also speaks to our potential — like the potential these murders wipe out — to make something meaningful, even in our grief.
Jonathan: I’d love to hear a little more about that last part. What are your hopes for this book now that it’s out in this world? Not commercially – but what it might do to and for the people who read it?
Crystal: Witnessing is not only viewing, but also having insight into these cruel acts. Many reviewers and early readers of Dark Testament said they were unaware of many of the victims and their stories. The frequency of police killings is so substantial that many fall under the radar, while others are front and center in media coverage. I thought it was important to include Rodney King as the first high-profile recorded case of brutal force by police, over 30 years ago. Since then, statistically, fatal police encounters have steadily increased. In the 1990s, a range of 400-500 people were killed per year. Last year, 1,192 people were killed by police officers with 596 suspected of non-violent offenses or no reported crime. So, as I scroll through my hopes for readers of this book it is fairly simple — awareness and empathy, which isn’t that much to ask, but is also everything. If it frustrates you into action, that’s okay too.