Holding America Accountable: be/trouble by bridgette bianca

Poet bridgette bianca wants you to know about black people. About black women. About herself. She wants you to understand that their lives are always in danger; that they ready themselves with armor for what the day will throw at them, how amazing; how “bad” they truly are.

In doing so bianca breaks up her debut collection, be/trouble, into four sections—“and the living be,” “this much i know is true,” “our fallen” and “ain’t we a dream too”—sprinkling in their amazingness between all the pain and violence and death they experience every day. bianca breaks her collection into helpful sections, not to make the poems easier to understand or easier to take in, but to ensure she, a black woman, is being heard. As such, she makes clear that her audience is white America, as she pushes back against America’s long and continued history of silencing black women, only noticing them when they can comfort—care—for white people during their most difficult times.

In the first poem “at least i can say” bianca opens by giving context for her discussion of black lives saying from personal experience, “i have/always been keenly aware/that i/could die any day” and “i have/always been sure something/was trying/to kill me.” It’s how black lives are lived each and every day. Danger, death, the possibility of it affecting every choice, as she says in “a saturday night,” about driving while black. bianca asks, “what do you do when you see lights in the rearview mirror/what do you do when the siren loops around your throat.” The use of “you” draws in and implicates the reader in this discussion on policing, effectively gives them a moment to reflect on their own experience, to allow bianca to make her point about how her experience, and by extension black peoples, are different from the readers’.

In this context—to ensure she is not spoken for or misunderstood again—breaking the collection up into sections works. Each section heading functions like the best crafted critical thinking questions, especially the first and last. With the first section heading, “and the living be,” how are their lives lived and in what ways? How are they constructed in America?

And the last section “ain’t we a dream too” begs the question, in what way? The dream white America has created to depict black women, in the sense of aren’t they cool, amazing, confident, or in the sense of this is how they conceived themselves to be, something quite amazing. Or,  all three?

bianca’s poems derive their power from their bluntness. For holding the reader accountable. One way she does this is by the use of refrains. She needs to emphasize certain key points about black people and black women, that white America keeps getting wrong or continues to ignore or discredit. The poem “an exasperated black woman said fuck i’ll do it” uses the alternating refrains “this is not a poem” and “this is my life” as their own stanzas following stanzas telling the truth about bianca’s lived life, what she was going through “…the morning after/the election” after she “…recently buried a loved one.” As the title states directly the frustration of always having to explain herself to white America because no one else will, these refrains stress the factual truth bianca relates, of how she always—and black women historically—have to set their needs and feelings aside to comfort white America when their feelings are uncomfortable,  to play the role of mammy. These refrains build in intensity, enwrapping the reader in Bianca’s world, as the words get more pointed.

this is not a poem…

…forgive me for not
holding back your hair
in solidarity

this is my life

So I’m a little busy

She confidently takes the power from the reader, flips and asserts it.

The refrain in this poem also acts as a call and response in the tradition of black and African poetry. And black music like Jazz and Blues. This, along with bianca’s codeswitching within and between poems, from proper educated English to brief instances of black English before switching back, forces English to adapt to her needs, to her ways of making meaning. These meanings are vital, specific and natural to her experiences as in “i’m trying to remember when i started apologizing for my body” when she says “no growth spurt would/puberty me.” Or in the poem “every nigga is a scar,” where bnianca says “and staying black don’t mean/niggas get to ride our backs/to freedom land/we ain’t no mule.”

Through all the danger, bianca is still able to beautifully assert how amazing her people and their culture are. The poem “that good black don’t crack” is an ode beginning “this is a big black greasy poem” unabashed about all facets of the black community from “the way the other dominos on the table/tremble/when somebody yells/gimme fitteen/while slapping bones” to “full of bus rides down south/or better yet car rides/when the air conditioner stops working/halfway through texas.”

However, the directness about who the audience is doesn’t always work. In an era where writers of color are done teaching white America about themselves, doing their work for them, when people of color are expected to do all the work of learning about white America, the directness took some getting used to. It wasn’t until I read “an exasperated black woman says fuck i’ll do it” that I started to understand that bianca was using this chance to hold white America accountable. Unfortunately this directness in who bianca is addressing unnecessarily interrupts the poems “the good black don’t crack” and “every nigga is a scar,’ undercutting the context in which the poems are powerfully understood, to create a teachable moment.

In the last section “ain’t we a dream” brings everything discussed in the first three sections to an unforgiving and raw head. bianca writes them through the emotional lens of empowerment. All the personality traits American society teaches black women not to inhabit—loudness, the right to their own feelings, joy, to be noticed, etc.—she inhabits with unabashed confidence. A forceful example is from “a message from uppity negresses” where she asserts at the end, that:

…i want you to know
i am all that
i am too good
i know my place is first
and if you have to ask
i have to confirm
the rumors are true
i am better than you
and you can stay mad

I saw such assertions intensify as be/trouble drew to a close. But once the dust settled, it’s apparent that bianca has pushed forward, moved past the witness of white institutional nonsense. Her loving, unflinching gaze of black lives. The only option that remains, she says, is to hold white America accountable and as she asks the reader in “i want the world to see” “am i making you uncomfortable.”