This American Ghost
An Introspective on Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat
The American ghost, in Khalisa Rae’s narrative, is a chimera—a multi formed, multi-faceted reflection and mirror of society, of survival, and suspense, of waiting to see what the future will unfold as the collective holds its breath, hoping for that cathartic release.
Rae shows an incredible attention to form and design, her work structured around the five elements of Fire, Wind and Water, Earth and Spirit. Each element exhibits rage, elation, fear, and hope; each a kind of presence that builds up to a full and complete understanding of housing the ghost(s) one may venerate, invoke, or hope to understand.
Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat by Khalisa Rae. Red Hen Press, 2021. 96 pages. $16.95.
In the collection, we sing along with Rae’s libretto titles and her dance halls, the imaginative fodder for the ghost’s lament linking memory and quotidian Mondays to lost matriarchs’ who are young in history. We as an audience are treated to the fantastical and speculative as we see magical mermaids associated with water goddess Mami Wata, known to the last generation that was African, before the specificity of tribal affiliations was stolen. In “Mermaids and Ghosts Ships” the collection is focused and clear in its statement, the danger of allowing mythicization to hold sway or reign over the collective imagination and the collective history of our genocide. This history is heavy, Rae asserts, one of us was the “whips, boots / jaws and teeth… [one of us] bloodlines / scattered…stolen cargo.” There’s that truth, that Black history is American history, that enslavement was two parties: the enslaved fighting against being stripped of agency and the agents of Whiteness who reaped the benefits of enslavement. Whiteness demands aggressors to uphold it and enough of those who, if not hoping to become aggressors themselves, will choose to perform a quiet acceptance of this creation of chattel slavery.
This history—its bile, shock, bones, surety and reality for all our ancestors—is necessary, restorative, cathartic. Otherwise, we are, as the saying goes, doomed to shuffle through this dance again and again. That’s what the ghosts are, locked in an agonizing limbo of repetition—that’s what we may become, if we are not careful. In listening and reckoning with this ghost leaping forward completely and assuredly from this Black woman storyteller’s throat, we create a oneness, resolution for the atrocities of enslavement to be recognized and de-weaponized in all our spiderweb connected lives. Taking a beat, for a moment, we must address that sound carried through the text: its most obvious joy—for this book does not skimp on necessary joy. It helps immensely to have such beautiful and melodic language—we lean on it when the imagery, the history, the pain, becomes too much.
Overall, the tone in Fire has a great dexterity and refinement of anger, saying perfectly what I, and likely a great deal of Black women, wish I had said during a micro-aggressive moment against our bodies and even the larger, historical context of Black femininity. The iconography weaponized against Black women’s bodies, particularly when displaying (righteous) anger, is both rampant and familiar to our audience: tennis superstar and great Serena William’s frustration against an umpire reduced to a thinly veiled disparagement and explicitly caricatured as an impotent child breaking her racket like a toy, or the ape comments directed towards Michelle Obama.
Incredibly relevant and rich for me was “Mad. Black. Bird.” which includes an epigraph from Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird,” and shows a moment ubiquitous to Black American women, a white hand rifling through sun-reaching Afro hair; no request, no introduction—as if that would suffice or allow—no connection or requirement to do so, only the need to satisfy the urge that popped into her head, to touch that. That, not human, that Other. In this past year I’ve thought about why this may occur, and I think it’s because that, as Black people, when we’re acknowledged, it’s as non-playing characters in this game we call life, with Whiteness and its allies as Main Characters.
Of course, Rae says it much more stylishly, beautifully, heartbreakingly; “she called her other friends over to pet and view / my exotic, my natural // And if I had swatted her hand away, screamed / and pushed her, I would have been called beast, / wild animal, untamed.” This ghost is temporary, a dying of self in a moment where the bird shrinks so that it will not have its wings broken further still, its anger mothered under what one knows intellectually—that there is a certain respectability one must practice in society and that differs depending on what color your skin is perceived as—and the pain of being touched without permission, becoming a zoological exhibit in an instant to the White Gaze and the threat of punishment for attempting to break out of the enclosure. Both spring from a primal place, both are unanswered by the ghosts, temporary or historical.
In the Wind and Water section, we start in Nature as appreciation for the natural world (alive) ends in food being eaten, devoured, and resistance to being labeled as an object. In “Heirloom,” the stark title turns the idea of a pretty little object on its head, the loneliness exhibited, passed down, Boo Hag sucked out of the living makes a skin crawling kind of horror on the page. How many dying towns have this kind of loneliness passed down “like a secret family recipe,” and how many are your next-door neighbors, clinging to a veneer of sanity in order to be perceived as one of the good ones?
This horror is further surveyed in “Tea Party at the Cemetery,” which is simply the most rock and roll title ever, and yet profoundly holistic, as social performance and ritual continue between the dead and the living. While all of that lives in the title, the poem itself explores more, or perhaps, it explores such a specificity I saw myself and a thousand other girls’ lives: “we built a haunting,” “[w]e buried a breathing thing here— // a coffin for each memory we didn’t dare / dig up. Spirits lurking.” There is a hint of danger at being thrown—yanked?—into the world as a woman, a body more dangerous to inhabit than not. So much of these stanzas are dedicated to beauty, to the need to repress—but the ghost, she mourns openly and full-throatedly.
Earth and Spirit close our narrative most appropriately with the poem, “Even After the Dust Settles,” its title conjuring images of a post battle scene, but triumphant or disastrous, who can say? That open ended conclusion would have worried me, frustrated me as a reader only a few years ago, but in the ambiguity is the real hope. To come down on one side for a successful exorcism would jinx us to fail, while believing in failure would condemn us to a repressive, haunting future, and the superstitious Southerner, and the desperately hopeful pandemic self that I am now, sees this open ending as both accurate in a Schrödinger’s cat sort of way, and artful, complete writing.
There is a magnificent thread of Afrofuturist themes and musings through these final poems. In “Epilogue to Banned Books,” Rae writes, “[o]ur nation—on the cusp of becoming a collection / of all the words we fear; all the little truths we white- / washed and blacked out are coming back to haunt us.” CRT, Wokeness, privilege…all come to mind, each attempting to name and exorcise certain ghosts that others would prefer to let inhabit this America we have built.
It is in this final section that one of my favorite titles appears, “The Dance Hall of My Mother’s Womb,” invoking a fantastic image of sonic connection and education in the embryonic fluid. This intimate moment is particularly relevant as our national conversation shows growing awareness of the distressing and horrific rates of Black maternal mortality rates; to see sweetness and hope portrayed in a Black woman’s pregnancy and survival and ability to then parent her child has not been the experience of each ghost present, but for the speaker’s mother it is, and all the ghosts share in that healing experience.
In Rae’s poems, the body’s exuberance is allowed, celebrated even, in all its glory and joy. Joy, like pain, is given its moment to echo, to work both ways in re-memory (history) and the unknown future—a Black womanist canon in deep conversation with Toni Morrison (the seminal text Beloved comes to mind of course, but also A Mercy’s bitter finale). Rae is an incredibly talented writer. Her work connects and works on a fantastical level reimagining history and on a narrative level inviting us to see her life and her own personal ghosts, and it's some of the best work I’ve read this year in terms of pure imagery. Rae’s collection has been such an inspiration for both myself and my writing partner, the idea of grappling with ghosts to whom you owe a certain kind of responsibility, ghosts who owe you restitution, that fraught and dangerous ability to stand in their presence, be empowered by it, and ask that eternal poetic question, what if you changed your life?
