Little Girl Blue: Poems

Abstract

What would Nina Simone say to Black artists today? We can assume she would admonish us to be uncompromising in our art, fierce in our citizenship, loud in our demands and bold in our self-determination and truth telling. In 1959, Simone, then an emerging artist, released her monumental album, Little Girl Blue. In 2021, the influence of Nina Simone echoes throughout Sequioa Maner’s prize-winning chapbook Little Girl Blue: Poems.Maner’s use of “Girl” can be assumed to mean more than age or girlhood. “Girl” conveys the weight—the blues—of a Black girl, or gurl, queer girl or sistergirl, you know—the girrrl that one girlfriend uses to start her story to another. The way Maner uses “girl” is understood because we (Black folks especially) know the blues. Black women, in particular, have articulated their blues in their art in music, dance, literature, politics. We know the girl, the woman, the mother, and the wife Stevie Wonder sings of in “Girl Blue” from his 1972 album, Music of My Mind: “Little girl, be fair / Show yourself you care.” After all, Yvonne Wright, a Black woman songwriter, co-wrote the song with Wonder.Wonder’s “Girl Blue” didn’t make the book’s music playlist that Maner curated on social media, but it’s important to connect the dots between our Black musicians and our Black poets: Black music is a reliable indicator of how Black folks experience the world. And music’s influence on Maner is evident not only in the chapbook’s title but in poems that highlight great musicians such as “Epistle (for Tupac Shakur)” and “The Day Prince Died.”Our collective memory and grief saturate this compact volume. Reminiscent of Nina Simone herself, the poet constantly intones collectivity—the “we,” the “us”—bringing readers along in each poem to examine the blues of Blackness: from the tragic and unnecessary deaths of Sandra Bland and Trayvon Martin to the desperate need to hold onto love during a pandemic.For many poets, myself included, the struggle we encounter while exploring contemporary themes is to not let the facts cloud our memories of the music and the beauty words can make. It’s a constant struggle, but a necessary one, to get out of the way of the poem and what it is trying to do. Writer Kalamu ya Salaam, who led New Orleans’ NOMMO Literary Society, was notorious for asking workshop participants who’d just read a piece: “What makes this a poem?” And to extend his question, we might ask what’s the distinction between poems today and musings on Twitter or Instagram? The poet’s task, which Maner does well, is to take us beyond the facts we know and help us to see even the familiar anew.Many poems that pull from contemporary headlines or those from the past can feel more (book) report-ish than poetic, but here the poet walks the tightrope of craft and innovation with poems that carefully attend to her subjects such as in “Upon Reading The Autopsy of Sandra Bland” or “Tangle of Pathology,” a phrase used by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1965 report that argued Black families were becoming increasingly matriarchal and thus pathological by design. Yet Maner’s poem prompts the reader to scan a QR code for an interactive exchange.Little Girl Blue sings and signifies not only in its elegies and research notes but also from its nontraditional forms and layouts that keep the reader from making assumptions about how to read each poem. Indeed, Maner even forces us to turn the book horizontally to read her poem “The Substantial Nigra or What Ali Might Say.” And in “In the Loophole of Retreat,” a found poem from Harriet Jacobs’s classic narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the reader encounters a poem where the words are crafted inside of an image of a house. Elsewhere, as in “How I Came to Remember My Name,” the speaker must return to her Black/blues self for survival: “If desire makes object of subject/then I have forgotten my Name . . .”This small but mighty book guides us through recent and past memory of Black pain. However, Maner refuses to leave us without a defiant future. Consider “Little Girl Blue (Coda),” the last poem in the collection: “So, go on blue girl, little girl blue! / This world is made for you.” With this mantra, Maner carves a space for her voice to be counted among the many literary caretakers of our memory and our blues.