Run Away from History

Abstract

Run Away from History Kazim Ali (bio) I’m at the tail end of this conversation but also at the tail end of history. Fanny Howe says five Black boys on a corner (any corner) are “runaways from history.” Meaning they are still enslaved. Still a slave. Tongo Eisen-Martin says, “I am arrested all the time for nothing.” And yet there is no white crime in America, statistically speaking, no police crime. When a dog wagged its tail and approached Christian Cooper in Central Park a white woman began screaming. That is the mythic beginning of the end for a Black man: a white woman screaming. It doesn’t matter what laws apply to his body because Blackness is the first law. It happened exactly when George Floyd was expiring. I thought of his breathlessness when I read about Amy Cooper screaming into her phone in Central Park. “Cooper,” every newspaper found it necessary to mention, “is of no relationship to Cooper.” Floyd being pressed from breath is what Cooper in her brutal imagination wanted to happen to Cooper. Fanny is the mother of a novelist and a designer, mother-in-law of another novelist and a poet, aunt to a novelist, sister to a poet, daughter of an actress and a Pink Boy, mentored by a playwright called Beckett, mentor to an aspirant named Ali, who followed her from the Vineyard to the Western shore, as did the characters in her novels, obsessed also with understanding race in America, trying to understand what is the worth of a person. I saw Tongo Eisen-Martin recite his poetry twice, and each time—for twenty minutes or a half hour—he recited off the page, only from memory, no, not from memory, membery, but from breath. In breath his lines arose. I kept checking against the page because I thought he might be engaging in a more ancient practice of inspiration, but no, not that: the words were as inscribed. [End Page 139] What words inscribe laws on bodies? Old Western ones that began with the representation of wealth: value placed upon labor and bodies required to transfer wealth. But from whom to whom? One Cooper was looking for birds. But in Black life in America the most ordinary event brushes up against death. [End Page 140] Kazim Ali Kazim Ali is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and cross-genre work. He is professor and chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California San Diego. Copyright © 2022 State University of New York