a very critical critique of my former perspective
(obviously I know that critical critique is redundant)
Disclaimer:
If you’re not Black or mixed with Black, you’re not the target audience for this post. Feel free to watch it if you want. It may be more fun for you to watch this video from my last post or check out some of my poems on YouTube.
For a long time this was my favorite poem I had written.
It was written for Black History Month in 2015. That year, Huff Post did a daily series asking what would become of the Black Future.
It was my recording debut on Jabee’s album In the Black Future There’s a Place So Dangerously Absurd. I read it in the video above and it’s the last poem in this video below (timestamp 6:34).
Also click here for the album version: part 1, part 2 here, and part 3 here (using the 3 part listening might make it more interesting since my critique is sort of in order). These are on Spotify too.
This is what I believed until high school became culturally irrelevant. It was written like a timeline from the past to the future. My artistic mistake was that it shows an uncommon way to think about history.
How do you feel about your relationship to your past and your relationship to your elders? The common belief is that the past is irrelevant to the present and future. What do you think? Is there anything you believe we did well in the past that we do not do as well now?
At approximately 8:55 I go into the specific references in the poem that are outdated now, 9/10 years later (I recorded this nearly a year ago).
There’s a natural hair reference in this poem that reminds me of my BlackStack post. “I was speaking from the mid-range of the natural hair movement.”
Spoken word culture is different from written poetry culture. “That line is not meant to be analytically significant.”
Is the Black Future an ideology? A metaphorical place? “In the Black future there’s a place so dangerously absurd…”
Is this poem for Black Americans only? Is it for kids only?
What do you think of the poem on its own? What do you think of my analysis of it 10 years later? Are you offended at all - by the poem or by my critique of it?
If you, like me, are into the nerdy shit, here is the intro to my master’s thesis that uses poetry and poetic language as a back drop for everything related to Black speculative storytelling.
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