The book is pre-Michael Brown, but the foretaste of Ferguson is unmistakable in the accumulation of stories called “Scripts for Situation Video” in which Rankine “overhears” damage being done. Rather than analyzing it, she memorializes it. Scripts center around Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, and voices out of Hurricane Katrina and elsewhere, circling back to the idea of racial profiling in the script for “Stop-and-Frisk”: “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”
The book bears witness to the role of race in our society and myriad private instances of “What did you say?” culminating in an exposé of the endless instances of racism encountered daily by people of color.
Shane McCrae’s Forgiveness Forgiveness begins with the section “The Visible Boy,” which takes as its conceit an old (racist) children’s book called Little Brown Koko. This section takes a hard look at the portrayal of the main character, the ramifications for the reader (the poet), for any reader, in fact, since the book contains Rankine’s idea (“Your physical carriage hauls more than your weight”). The story of Koko and McCrae’s interpretations hold memory, personal and collective; the poems allow McCrae to sort through and reconfigure the emotions and experience of a child (who happens to be biracial) through repetition of the phrase, “the book as I remember it.” One could substitute “the past as we/you remember it” in a poem tellingly titled “The Dead Come Back”:
In the book as I remember it
An unseen something stalks him like the
Something I felt inside me stalking me
In the book as I remember it
He stole the watermelon from an old white neighbor
He rolls it slowly
as the stone was rolled from the mouth of the tomb from
which the lynched come back and live forever
Many of the poems involve white grandparents, a child who identifies as black, and missing parents. In this way, McCrae writes about the invisibility of the black American in the white world. As the child pieces together his history before his own memories, he must cope with one-sided information about his father in the poem “How My Grandfather Painted Water”: “Anyway, he was the black one, and he/didn’t exist.” That poem forms a bridge between the Little Brown Koko series and the more personal narrative poems that follow:
[my grandfather] kept only one book on the
living room shelves—I mean, one
book that wasn’t an album of family
photographs or stacks of Playboys
before my grandmother realized I had
noticed—a children’s book called Little
Brown Koko.And I remember Koko,
and his mother, and a watermelon, and
I remember it was the only book in the
house that made me feel dirty. And I
remember it was the only book in the
house—and I mean dozens of albums
of family photographs, they were my
favorite book, and one had a picture
of an F1 race car on the cover—that
seemed to be about me.
Because he had always wanted a son--
he had always wanted a man to be the
man he was.