Back to the Present

Something more than a triple rhyme links imperial and funereal. Consider, as prologue, 'the scale of empire,' which, in the long view of planetary history, might well be drawn by ants -- those 'small emperors of patience' that 'walk a bridge of dinosaur bones.' Then fast-forward to the 1840s, when 'Manifest Destiny' emerged as an ethically void if rhetorically heated justification qua euphemism for the westward expansion and imperial ambitions of these United States. Not, be it said, that three centuries of genocidal conflict with Native Americans -- begun in 1622 against the Powhatan Confederacy and 'officially' concluded in 1890 with the massacre at Wounded Knee -- had failed to make those ambitions manifest indeed.

The events revisited in Blue-Tail Fly take place between 1833 and 1895, a period that spans the final chapter of the so-called Indian Wars, as well as the Mexican War, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Yet, without breaking their historical frame, these poems -- more precisely, their diverse personae -- speak directly to our own historical moment, as if it were the next page but one in the annals of domination and oppression. And what they speak is not, for us, the armchair wisdom of hindsight, but the hard reality of aftermath. For there is something uncanny (and not a little maddening) in the homologies that can be drawn between these artful redactions of the historical record -- written and oral, official and unofficial -- and the painful testimonies and empty rhetoric we will find juxtaposed in tomorrow’s news.

Woven from the words of officers and foot soldiers, conscripts and civilians, free persons of color and slaves, Native Americans and Mexicans, farmers and common laborers, poets and politicians, these eloquent, clear-eyed, compassionate poems revive and recall the lives and the losses endured throughout a defining period in the ongoing scourge that is U.S. imperialism – lives and losses that resonate to this day. And, they inspire us, like the apocryphal blue-tail fly, to persist in our efforts to unseat the masters of war.

Vievee Francis's Blue-Tail Fly will be published in April 2006 by Wayne State University Press.

 
more columns by Ted Pearson