Slow Violence and the Anti-elegy in Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler

Abstract

ABSTRACT “Slow Violence and the Anti-elegy in Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler” theorizes the elegiac consciousness of Patricia Smith, whose serial poetry collection Blood Dazzler (2008) addresses the environmental, national, and political catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, while retooling the elegy’s formal and affective conventions. In the collection, Smith unsettles a normative elegiac structure that seeks to offer relief from grief. Over the years, several critics have expanded and refined the elegy, but there has been little discussion of the role of the African American elegy in times of climate emergency. I argue that Blood Dazzler is both an ecopoetic collection and a distinctly “Black elegy,” in conversation with such predecessors as Langston Hughes, who also called upon the Blues and melancholic mourning, with its Freudian inflections of ambivalence, to chart the ongoing nature of environmental racism. In this vein, Smith reimagines a politics of mourning that problematizes collective solace in a country where racism and climate change compound and exacerbate the impacts of natural disaster.