from Quan Barry, controvertibles
Let my confession start here: I too am innocent & black but millennial, my fear
academic & secondhand. Like the yellowed photograph in the New Yorker
of two men hanging like piñatas above a crowd,
the teenaged girls dressed for cotillion.
Images & stories. Strange fruit.
Barry’s speaker admits that the lynching and mob violence familiar from the first half of the twentieth century is distant history. How can the speaker even find metaphors to address such distant horror now? A child’s party game? Violence rewarded with sweetness? The formalities, gender reinforcement, and class-consciousness of a cotillion? The poem suggests the difficulty of trying to connect with the country’s difficult racial history, and that trying to do so perhaps can even get surreally comic.
Barry’s juxtaposes “Images & stories” with “Strange fruit.” On one hand, the poem alludes to Billie Holiday’s plaintive vocals and Abel Meeropol’s poem protesting the lynching of African American men and mob violence, and to the horrible metaphor that dead and violated bodies of African American men are fruit. Who would taste such fruit? Who would purposefully grow the fruits of hatred and injustice? But this line also suggests that the images and stories—of racial violence, racial injustice—are also strange fruit. History has grown into the dread pictures and stories that we cannot escape. We are automatically removed from an image, outside the story. We are individual readers, listeners, viewers, at times producers, and more largely we are members of a national audience and at a distance. Maybe the poem suggests that history (stories and images) that has grown distorted, unnatural, or unfamiliar brings an additional violence and harm to our imagination. Empathy requires intimacy.
Quan Barry, controvertibles. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.