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.”

Los Ángeles at Ground Level: Letters To My City by Mike Sonksen

The poet Mike Sonksen knows more about Los Ángeles than almost anyone. It began when he was a kid, his father and both grandfathers introducing him to the sprawling city by taking him on destination drives. Due to his father’s love of architecture, having, “taught me about…Frank Lloyd Write from an early age,” Sonksen “had a natural interest in maps and geography.” Those drives fostered that interest, dipping in and out of distinctly planned and inhabited neighborhoods that made up the patchwork quilt of, not only the city, but Los Ángeles County.

In Sonksen’s new book Letters To My City (The Accomplices/Writ Large Press, 2019), he explores the city’s geography and architecture from the ground up, from his perspective as a third-generation Angeleño. The book is a collection of his poems and articles that span his 20+ years of exploring, not only the landscapes of Los Ángeles, but the people and cultures and histories of communities like Little Tokyo, The Eastside, Leimert Park and even Cambodia Town in Long Beach.

Early in Letters, Sonksen includes his remembrance of local human interest reporter Huell Howser in, “Huell Howser and the Gospel of Beauty.” Howser hosted “California’s Gold,” on local PBS, highlighting landmarks, small towns, places of interest or events in California that were not well known, including countless in L.A. and Southern California. In each episode Howser conducted impromptu and informal interviews with locals involved with the sites he visited. When the show debuted in 1991, Los Ángeles and California were beginning to take a serious interest in and find significance in its own history. Howser, according to Sonksen, “provided the common ground for people to relate and meet on,” especially in Southern California, where Howser lived, “like he did for my dad, grandmother and me.” Plus, “‘California’s Gold’ reinforced my own burgeoning interest in this history; I saw Huell as a messenger to stick to my own California dream.”

Along with the article, “Community, not a Commodity: The Ethics of Giving a City Tour,” the opening 35 pages or so of Letters To My City act as explanation of Sonksen’s aesthetics and why he tells the stories he does: Get the History Right, Sharing Authority and Debunking Stereotypes and the unofficial, The Right to the City.

The concepts of Mike Sonksen’s aesthetics are apparent throughout Letters To My City. He shares his authority by quoting long time Cambodian residents of Long Beach’s Cambodia Town in “Driving Down the 105,” as a way for them to tell their neighborhood’s history. When he profiles a person, such as the late dynamic Chicana writer from Oxnard, California, Michele Serros, he lets those who knew her personally, speak to who she really was.

When Sonksen entered UCLA in 1992, when native Angeleños like Lynell George, Ruben Martinez and Luis J. Rodriguez were publishing their journalism and narratives about L.A., and he was being taught by urban theorist and native Mike Davis, they helped reinforce his “interest in all things Los Angeles.” He learned about letting a place speak for itself.

However, Sonksen’s articles can leave readers of Letters’ wanting more specific, from-the-ground-up, portrayals of L.A. Too many lack depth in the content he’s exploring, where he ends up repeating himself instead of expanding on his idea(s). A good example is “The Cascades.” Here, language is used more as a summary, and where he needs to expand his ideas, Sonksen repeats information. “We notice on our left side a park with a well-lit hillside waterfall fountain. Quickly I turn left heading towards what looks to be a park.” As the centerpiece of the article, in sentence two, I want to know how this waterfall fountain ads to the neighborhood’s atmosphere.

Another example is when Sonksen says at various times throughout his articles, “as noted/said earlier,” and proceeds to only restate that same sentence as above, before immediately moving on to a new paragraph or point.

Yet, there are many engaging and rich articles that portray L.A. from the lived-in, ground-up perspective Sonksen’s acquired from a lifetime of personally engaging in L.A. Enough for Letters to join the narrative of correction written by native Angeleños, illustrating that Angeleños actually do care about their city, that there is a deep, rich history and [literary] culture there, that there are beautiful neighborhoods—in all definitions of the term—most having nothing to do with Hollywood, some with predominately “humble working-class people.” Sonken quotes Lynell George at one point in Letters, saying, “we know much more, it seems, about ancient cities and dead civilizations…than we do about day-to-day life in ‘South Central Los Angeles’…beyond the trope.”

Sonksen too, goes beyond the tropes, to portray the suburbs in “Something in the Water: Hip-Hop History in Cerrritos.” He quotes DJ Rhettmatic, remembering his childhood in Cerritos in the ‘80s, saying , “…their [his father’s employment’s] old building is actually on Valley…right next to the old Don Juan Mexican restaurant that used to be there on the corner…” His DJ crew, “…used to DJ parties at Don Juan during the early stages before the crew even manifested.” These are details about how culture was created in Cerritos and what kind of culture it was, that is now preserved.

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Letters To My City is most powerful when Sonksen explores what Los Ángeles is and reminds the reader what L.A. has. That’s where he’s at his best, inhabiting the same boundless enthusiasm for his subjects that he saw Huell Howser inhabit for his.

Sonksen writes many list and ode poems, full of local history and culture. In the poem “Ode to L.A. Women Writers,” he reminds readers “L.A. women writers are the masters of this ecology.” He then lists as many as he can, from Wanda Coleman to Octavia E. Butler, to Irene Soriano and Helena Maria Viramontes. In “Homage to Little Tokyo” Sonksen repeats throughout, “Little Tokyo is…” That device creates the sense of community pride that builds throughout the poem as he proceeds to describe the heartbeat of one of L.A.’s most iconic neighborhoods. “Little Tokyo is legacy businesses/Nisei witnesses.” he writes, tightly weaving in the community’s history as context for his sustained focus on the individuals who’ve shaped Little Tokyo.

Although his poems celebrate L.A., Sonksen casts a critical eye on the city’s faults and issues. “I Am Still Alive in Los Angeles!” an update to his most iconic poem “I Am Alive in Los Angeles!” opens Letters and sets the context for how the rest of the book is understood. The poem steeps the city in three of its pressing issues: affordability, traffic and environment. The opening dives right in: “I am alive in Los Angeles/even as the price of rent rises/and gridlock strangles central arteries…” But through it all, Sonksen says, “The community is a poem/in progress called Los Angeles.”

Los Ángeles, and cities in general, are by their very nature imperfect, always in transition to becoming something else, especially at the community level. It’s a city’s communities, Sonksen reminds us, that shape what a city is. And those communities are shaped by the people that live there. Those, he says in the title poem, who “pound the pavement, fight the good fight,” are civically engaged.

Though a fuller portrayal of L.A. would have included more communities in other parts of L.A. (e.g. the Persian community on the Westside or any specific community in the San Fernando Valley), as Letters primarily explores downtown to the east (the Eastside, SGV) and South Central to South L.A. County (Cerritos, Long Beach), it’s the ground-up perspective from which Sonksen portrays each community and tells their history, that creates the mostly intimate portrayal(s) of this often written about and vastly misunderstood city. By the end of Letters To My City it becomes apparent that this perspective is the only authentic way to truly understand Los Ángeles—or any city.