The poet Robin Coste Lewis’s second collection, the exquisite “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” (Knopf), is a book about how the dead do not stay dead. Not only because the author believes, or wants to believe, that she can awaken the deceased with her pen—“I am trying to make the dead clap and shout,” she writes—but because those who are gone are determined not to stay put. Not in the heart, and certainly not in memory.
In a sense, Lewis’s elegiac and haunted volume, filled with both words and photographs, found her long before she conceived it. Twenty-five years ago, Lewis was living in Rhode Island, teaching at Wheaton College and writing fiction. (She had received a B.A. from Hampshire College, where she compared African and South Asian diasporic literature, in 1989, and studied Sanskrit and comparative religious literature at Harvard’s Divinity School, where she earned a master’s degree in 1997.) But she returned home to Los Angeles after the death of her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Mary Coste Thomas Brooks, to empty out her house, which was going to be razed. Under Brooks’s bed, Lewis found a suitcase containing hundreds of photographs—some in black-and-white, some in color, some posed, others candid—that were a record not only of Lewis’s large extended family but of worlds that had vanished, of decisive moments that had come and gone during the Second Great Migration, of which Lewis’s family, which originated in Louisiana, had been a part. It was unclear who had taken the photographs, but, by collecting the images and storing them together in that suitcase, Brooks had created a kind of narrative. It fell to her granddaughter to place it within the larger history of humanity.
Rather like Pilate, in Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel, “Song of Solomon,” who carries around the bones of her father because doing so, she says, “frees up your mind”—which is to say, frees you from the burden of history so that you can think about other things—Lewis has now been carrying her forebears with her for a quarter century. These bones don’t so much free up her mind as feed her imagination—and quarrel with the usual ways in which history gets told. “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” assembles a hundred and seventy-nine photographs from Brooks’s collection; interspersed with the images are short poems, sometimes just a line or two, that look like ticker tape from a ghostly world and read like messages in bottles cast out to sea by an emotionally marooned person with a surfeit of longing, hoping for love.
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Lewis is no stranger to psychological or physical injury. When I first spoke to her, for a radio interview in 2015, she recounted a terrible accident she’d had in 2001: after dining at a restaurant in San Francisco, she got up to get her coat and fell into a hole in the floor that had not been cordoned off. She suffered brain damage, to the extent that doctors told her she wouldn’t be able to write more than one line a day. So she worked on a line every day in her mind. Other lines followed. This was when she transitioned from writing prose to writing poetry.
The title of “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” is taken from a line by the Black Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, who is the subject of a long narrative poem that falls in the middle of the collection: “The effect of such storms of wind and snow, or rain, is abject physical terror, due to the realization of perfect helplessness.” The Henson poem is not accompanied by images and, unlike the rest of the volume, is printed on white paper, rather than black: Henson’s polar snow sprinkled with his Black life in Lewis’s words. The book’s design is important, as it raises questions about what the eye sees and what the mind retains. Printing the images, shorter poems, and isolated lines against a black background evokes old-fashioned photo albums and drives home how modern technology has robbed photographs of their tactility, even as it has saved them from destruction. Those black pages also represent Lewis’s interest in blackness—as a color, as a symbol, as a race, and as a defining element of her own heritage.
Like many readers, I admired Lewis’s first collection, “Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems”—a meditation on, among other things, women’s bodies, family lore, and Black slaveowners in the antebellum South—which was awarded the 2015 National Book Award for poetry. A large part of my approbation had to do with her seriousness about the past, her understanding of how it both weighs us down and lights the way in all the moments we share with the living and the dead.
In a sharp prose prologue, Lewis listed the rules she set for herself when writing the volume’s title poem—a nearly eighty-page work. “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” she explained, is “comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.” Then:
Lewis also incorporated, as she noted, “titles of art by black women curators and artists, whether the art included a black female figure or not,” and “by black queer artists, regardless of gender, because this body of work has made consistently some of the richest, most elegant, least pretentious contributions to Western art interrogations of gender and race.”
“Voyage of the Sable Venus” is part history and part homage, an epic song built from shards, a reflection of the Black women Lewis saw in art work after art work who had been broken into pieces by Western eyes. From the opening section, titled “The Ship’s Inventory”:
Through these titles, Lewis captured the ways in which Black women had been aestheticized across the millennia, pinned to a history that found them interesting for various reasons—their skin color, their hair, their culture—without ever letting them live their lives. And what were those lives? Burned, choked, fired, glazed on a vase. “Voyage of the Sable Venus” gives those women a new life and the freedom to voyage away from art, even as Lewis creates it.
“To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” is another voyage. But the view is different, as is the destination: what Lewis is resuscitating here is a community, a family she knew or wishes she’d known—although they might have been suspicious of her. (Artists are often viewed with skepticism by their families, since part of their job is to rip at the fabric of relationships, the better to reveal the truth of being. Lucille Clifton wittily captured that skepticism in her poem “here rests,” in which she recalled her sister saying, “when you poem this / and you will she would say / remember the Book of Job.”)
“Black people are part of everyone and everything,” Lewis, who has Afro-Creole roots, told me in 2016, when her second book hadn’t yet fully taken shape in her mind. I was visiting Los Angeles, and we were sitting near her home in Silver Lake. It was the golden hour, and Lewis’s brown freckles stood out against her toffee-colored skin. Her family had left New Orleans for California in the nineteen-fifties, and she wanted to delve deeper into the history of human migration. Louisiana, she said, had been “a mythical place” for her when she was growing up. “My family’s history, for sure, but the history of that place, the beauty of that place, period, is so intense to me,” she said. “And it’s the lost country. We were raised that way: this place is far, and we’ll never get back. It definitely felt like I was a child of exiles.”
In her new book, she wanted to marry her feelings about the omnipresence of Blackness to a kind of history of photography. She told me then, with great excitement, that she had discovered that the first Black poetry anthology “published on the North American landmass” had been put out in New Orleans in 1845, in French, by freemen of color, and that the first daguerreotype in the American South is thought to have been produced by a man of color, in 1839. White supremacy, she said, had necessitated Black nationalism. But what saddened Lewis about looking at art history solely in the context of a Black-nationalist agenda was that it tended to minimize the contributions of the artists of color who produced work on flowers or other traditionally “beautiful” subjects. “Nationalism is a sneaky little bitch,” she said. “Because how it affected our scholarship is people saying that those brothers”—the nineteenth-century freemen who made books and images—“had fucked-up politics, they had slaves, some other people were passing, and meanwhile I’m, like, No, no, no, that’s what’s so interesting, because you’re getting to see just how fluid and elastic Blackness really is. In 1845, it’s almost two decades before Emancipation, and they’re publishing a fucking poetry anthology? And in French? And you don’t give a shit ’cause they want to write about flowers? I say fucking congratulations to a motherfucker who’s writing about flowers in the antebellum South. How did you pull off that psychological feat?”
Nearly everything Lewis talked about that afternoon shows up in “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” but it has been transmogrified by time, and by Lewis’s long search for a self that belongs to artistic, intellectual, and ethnic tribes but doesn’t allow a political stance to limit her defiantly Black and female creative vision. The poet opens her new book with childhood photographs of her three older siblings. Soon after that, accompanying a snapshot of Lewis, days old and squalling in a hospital crib, comes this text:
Lewis’s tone in the short poems in “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” brings to mind other writers, including Muriel Rukeyser and Ai and early Toni Morrison, who had a special interest in women’s bodies, and in rendering sensuality on the page as something deep and evolutionary. Lewis is a romantic, greedy for love, but wary of it, too, because love is the first thing that life hurts. Life disrupts even the ultimate forms of closeness: with one’s mother and with Mother Earth. Through birth, we leave one salty red grave for another.
The next photograph in the book is of a Black woman posing at a studio. She wears a long dark skirt, and her hair is tied back. Her impassive face, the studio backdrop: Could we be in New Orleans, before Lewis’s family journeyed west? We can’t know, because time has robbed us of so much, even of the origin of us. (Lewis names the people in the photographs, where possible, in an appendix, but does not identify their relationship to her.) Lewis has the ardor and the delicacy of an archeologist who knows that these totems, these relics of the past, these tombs dug in warm earth crawling with worms and sunshine, could, with patience, reveal an entire city—a metropolis of the self.
A picture of Lewis’s mother from the fifties—a thin, vibrant-looking woman with cropped hair, holding a bouquet (Is it her wedding day? The beginning of the story that will lead to Robin?)—is accompanied by this lyric:
Lewis’s love of women—she is openly queer—is one of the incredibly sweet (but never saccharine) elements of this book. It’s the matriarchs, with their strength, their mystery, their complications, who have a hold on Lewis and will not let her go, just as her grandmother’s visual treasure trove will not let her go. Turn the page in “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” and you’ll find Lewis’s mother now standing at what appears to be a banquet. A young couple separate her from an attractive young man. Are they the hosts of the party? Are they the bride and groom, embarking on a grand adventure? By this point, you understand that Lewis is doing something different with captions. Hers are filled not with factual information but with emotion. Her words direct us to the beauty of what she sees in her mother’s face:
Words change pictures, just as pictures expand on words. Sometimes, going through Lewis’s book, I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s wonderful 1931 essay “Little History of Photography,” and, in particular, his take on loneliness in photographs. The wedding-banquet photo has all the signs of what I call “Negro specificity”—elegant place settings, flowers, hair, and suits just so—that speak of what has been achieved, and of what will be achieved by the generation that follows. But isn’t achievement, by definition, a lonely thing? One that separates you, economically and otherwise, from those who came before you?
That “beauty in order,” as the playwright Adrienne Kennedy described it in her scrapbook-as-memoir “People Who Led to My Plays” (1987), can be disrupted, too. In Los Angeles, Lewis talked to me about the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child: “I came out to my mother about my [maternal] grandfather’s pedophilia against me from my dorm at Hampshire, and my mother said, ‘That never happened,’ and then, ‘Guess what I bought at Saks?’ She was in shock, I discovered later. She’d hoped I didn’t remember. I began to ask questions about several incidents—and that destroyed her. I didn’t tell my father what had happened until after my grandfather died—because I was raised by men who believed in honor and retribution, and I didn’t want my father or brothers or uncles to go to jail. But the gift of all this is that both my parents embraced me then, and their honesty and rage and sorrow and company reduced the impact that my grandfather’s mental illness had on my life.” Part of the strength of Lewis’s new book is that little is explicitly described; you won’t get any standard revelations here. Lewis tells stories through metaphor and the language of longing. Her urge is to reach out to the dead, to revitalize them, to make history notice them. Abuse is embedded in the danger and the power of the words. (Lewis’s grandfather appears in several images.)
Lewis is fierce in her advocacy for her parents, both of whom are now dead. “I idolized my father,” she told me. “It was hard for me to accept that he was just a man. He was a fantastic man.” Lewis’s father was, she told me, “a closet mathematician.” Unfortunately, his parents could afford to send only one child to college—his older brother, who became a pediatrician. After serving in the Second World War, Lewis’s father worked as a janitor, and then as a forklift operator, for decades. Dreams don’t die. They live on in your children, or in family lore, until they become questions—Why didn’t Dad do this? Why did Mom do that?—that amount to a kind of haunting.
For Lewis, this haunting extends beyond her immediate family to the many folks in these photographs who dreamed of being something different in a changed world. Henson, the subject of the longest poem in the book, “The Ark: Self-Portrait as Aphrodite Using Her Dress for a Sail,” was reportedly one of the first men to reach the North Pole, in 1909. His ferocious determination to fulfill his ambitions is mirrored by Lewis’s; the two are linked by parallel desires to be free, an impulse that makes them family. At first, they are father and daughter, and then, because Lewis is the writer and has the last word, she becomes the parent of the story, she and all her Black female ancestors at once, a kind of buoy riding and never sinking on the sea. Saying adieu to Henson, to that part of history, before returning to her family photographs, Lewis writes:
Lewis carries Henson’s dream—and the dreams of all the family members she knew or didn’t know—into the world of her imagination, which also begins with a dream. She writes in “The Ark”:
What is writing but listening for what you’ve never heard before? And exploring—sometimes in words, sometimes in words and images—the hitherto unknown regions of your mind and, God willing, the minds of all the people who made you? ♦
