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Summary
Summary
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics--of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present--timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
Author Notes
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker's debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as "a dynamic craftsperson" of "considerable consequence to American poetry."
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As witnessed in this third collection, blackness cannot be confined to a simple definition. Parker writes of the black experience not as an antidote or opposite to whiteness, but a culture and community where irreplicable nuances are created in spite of, not because of, pain and trauma. Blackness cannot be bought or sold; it's an inheritance. For example, in "Magical Negro #607: Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons," Parker writes, "When I'm rich I will still be Black./ You can't take the girl out of the ghetto/ until she earns it, or grows up into it." Similarly, in "The History of Black People," Parker frames the legacy of black people as "an investigation" and "a tragicomic horror film" and "joy stinging pink lips." Parker uses personal narratives to deconstruct societal stereotypes of black womanhood. In "When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed next to Me and Falls Asleep," she observes, "When I walk into the world and know/ I am a black girl, I understand/ I am a costume. I know the rules./ I like the pain because it makes me." (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Rachael Allen's debut, Kingdomland (Faber, £10.99), will surprise those who first encountered her through the Faber New Poets series. Where those early poems were often droll and precisely contemporary, full of youth's shoulder-shrugging ennui, this first book has an urgency and a quieter seriousness. "Watch the forest burn / with granular heat", demands one dislocated voice; Kingdomland is a world of shadowy tragedies and travesties, whether a "monstrous double horse", a "many bird roast" with "as many eyes as a spider", or simply "pain, deep-seared". Hurt and harm surface throughout Allen's writing, intent on uncovering the grotesque beneath the everyday, even as it remains oddly distant and indistinct: "a stark bright woman" who "holds something small, ungrippable". Disturbing, unnerving and aware, these poems linger through effective image-making, where a girl watches "a haunted old body, the one she'll inhabit / that drags up and down the coast". Can a poet be popular and critically acclaimed? Jonathan Edwards's 2014 debut My Family and Other Superheroes won the Costa poetry award and the Wales Book of the Year People's Choice award, combining comedy and a surreal touch in reimagining the familiar to winsome effect. His poems are easy-going but subtly formal, clever but accessible, and his follow-up, Gen (Seren, £9.99), won't disappoint. Here comes everyone: Harry Houdini on Newport Bridge, Coleridge chancing a lottery ticket, Tanya's house party with "music / pouring from the chimney". There is something of the late Michael Donaghy about Edwards's simpatico voice, and like Donaghy he is at his best when he leads us astray. "Reader, if you take my hand / and step outside with me now": the poet nudges, and we follow. Touching character portraits reiterate why Edwards has won plaudits, but the acerbic edge that pervades Gen also suggests a new direction. "The saddest triptych / is our blood, trouble / passed down", writes US poet Morgan Parker in her third volume, Magical Negro (Corsair, £10.99). Fierce, playful and political, Parker's poems celebrate the everyday just as they face off ancestral hurt, attempting a poetic escape act to reclaim "the history of black people, adapted from white people". At times bluntly declarative - "the body is a person" - these verses conjure folk heroes through confessional monologues, such as "Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons", "Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s", or the subverted prayer of "Brooklyn": "Give us this day we light soy candles / for dead brothers". Holding history and the contemporary to account, Magical Negro meets prejudice with an unwavering eye. If Parker's directness can sometimes sour, the best poems here provoke and surprise: "I'm being repetitive now, but do you ever hate yourself?" When she died in 2017, tributes abounded for poet and novelist Helen Dunmore. Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 (Bloodaxe, £14.99) spans her 10 collections, starting with Inside the Wave , 2018 Costa book of the year and a precise exploration of life, love and mortality, before returning to The Apple Fall , published when she was 30. Like polished pebbles worn true with time's passing, the strongest poems confirm a gift for the hauntingly exact yet humane lyric. "You looked away just once / as you leaned on the chip-shop counter, / and forty years were gone". Dunmore can draw on poetry's power to distil an entire lifetime into a moment.
Booklist Review
As in her last book of poetry, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), Parker again deconstructs a pantheon of popular Black icons, this time through a disconnected cycle of Magical Negro poems. While sending up celebrities in Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama and Michael Jackson in Blackface on a Date with Tatum O'Neal, Parker also draws a somber lineage through ostensibly superficial similarities: The gap in James Baldwin's teeth speaks to the gap in Malcolm X's teeth. The result is a profound meditation on the history and future of Black liberation. From a schoolchild's concerns ( How can I concentrate / on photosynthesis when / there is a thing called Africa ) to the problematic implications of the increasingly popular invocation, now more than ever, which, when uttered by the most politically liberal but socially comfortable of Whites, translates into, I straight up did not believe you before. A searing indictment, an irreverent lampoon, and a desperately urgent work of poetry, to be read alongside the work of Eve L. Ewing, Tiana Clark, and Nicole Sealey.--Diego Báez Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
how wide is the gulf between the realities of black lives and their representation in American popular culture, which overwhelmingly emphasizes white narratives? "Privilege is asking other people / to look at you," Morgan Parker writes in her third poetry collection, "Magical Negro," a work that explores the gap between black experience and the white imagination's version of it. In the popular canon the trope of the "magical Negro" is a black character who turns up exclusively to aid, often through uncanny wisdom, a white character. To say that Parker seeks to reclaim these characters oversimplifies the book's tense negotiations of pop culture, systemic racism and black womanhood. Rather, "Magical Negro" highlights the white imagination's more subtle violences, especially those that wear a smile and extend a hand in the name of charity or diversity, all to depict white people as a tolerant majority. Parker confronts this display of inclusionary rhetoric in a poem called " 'Now More Than Ever,' " defining the title phrase as something whites say "to express their surprise / and disapproval of social or political conditions which, / to the Negro, are devastatingly usual." The poem suggests that the phrase is used patronizingly, "accompanied by a solicitation for unpaid / labor from the Negro": often in the form of time, art, or an intimate and lengthy explanation of the Negro's life experiences, likely not dissimilar to a narrative the Negro has relayed before to dead ears. Parker carries forward this concern about free labor and the commodification of minority experience from her previous collection, "There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé," in which she wrote that "art is nice but the question is how are you / making money are you for sale." Her audience here is not the white reader who seeks to experience - and therefore tokenize, exoticize and commodify - "the other." That's not to say white readers shouldn't read this collection; in fact, I'dargue they should seek it out, if only to push whiteness to the edges of their reading lives. It's imperative, however, that we acknowledge the line between readership (who reads) and audience (for whom the text was written). While some of Parker's poems ironically posit themselves as "guides" to black culture, the collection, by and large, provides a space to celebrate black excellence and black joy as well as to commiserate about injustice. "My body is an argument I did not start," Parker writes, centering her particular experiences as a black woman in a way that calls to mind June Jordan or Robin Coste Lewis. Throughout Parker's collection, we see the paradoxical invisibility and hypervisibility of black women, as with "Magical Negro #3: The Strong Black Woman," whose title character is sexualized to the point that the speaker suggests assaulting her, then says, "She / won't feel nothing." The Strong Black Woman is hypervisible in her sexuality but invisible when someone abuses her. "I worry sometimes / I will only be allowed a death story," Parker confides later. This fear is charged by the accounts of racist violence and police brutality in other poems. Parker challenges us to be careful with our language, especially regarding the deaths of black people. In "Magical Negro #84: The Black Body," she writes: The body is a person. The body is a person. The body is a person. The body is a person. The body is a person. So often "the black body" is used in shorthand to talk about the direct object of violence, but the phrase distorts, even erases the humanity of the victims and survivors. Through repetition, Parker rejects this erasure. (Elsewhere, she uses repetition to reflect unchanging history: '"Now More Than Ever' " ends with "it would appear that the Negro must / live the life of the Negro, ever, now and ever" before repeating "and ever" over 180 times.) Parker is a dynamic craftsperson whose associative thinking complicates traditional confessional approaches. She often uses short, unadorned statements, but uses them _ to portray a seemingly unassuming speaker whose complexity is revealed through deft line breaks. "Who Were Frederick Douglass's Cousins, and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School" begins: I have a body. It sits in a desk. Every day is bitten with new guilt. My teacher can see right through me, all the way to Black History Month. The first three statements provide us with the setting, as well as the speaker's deep awareness of her body's vulnerability and her emotional life. The fourth sentence, which begins the third line, uses line breaks to say more than one thing at once: "My teacher can see right" - that is, the teacher has insight deemed "correct" by society; "My teacher can see right through me, all the way," meaning that the teacher can see through any facade, self-protective or otherwise, the speaker projects; and then "My teacher can see right through me, all the way to Black History Month," meaning that the teacher only sees the black speaker's relevance one month out of the year. This collection further evidences Morgan Parker's considerable consequence in American poetry, especially in the way that it demonstrates her skill of nuance. Don't be fooled by the collection's candor into thinking that these poems are all surface. Subtext and allusion abounds in this text, in part because Parker's dizzying associative leaps reject a hierarchy of "poetic" subject matter, recognizing that "everything is urgent." Especially the poems of Morgan Parker. EMILIA PHILLIPS is the author of three poetry collections, most recently "Empty Clip."
Table of Contents
| I Let Us Now Praise Famous Magical Negroes | |
| I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background | p. 3 |
| Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s | p. 5 |
| Everything Will Be Taken Away | p. 6 |
| Magical Negro #3: The Strong Black Woman | p. 8 |
| The High Priestess of Soul's Sunday Morning Visit to the Wall of Respect | p. 10 |
| And Cold Sunset | p. 11 |
| Nancy Meyers and My Dream of Whiteness | p. 12 |
| Whites Only | p. 15 |
| Magical Negro #607: Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons | p. 17 |
| Magical Negro #84: The Black Body | p. 20 |
| Sammy Davis Jr. | p. 21 |
| Let's Get Some Better Angels at This Party | p. 22 |
| The History of Black People | p. 24 |
| II Field Negro Field Notes | |
| Two White Girls in the African Braid Shop on Marcy and Fulton | p. 31 |
| "Now More Than Ever" | p. 32 |
| Black Women for Beginners Pt. 1 | p. 35 |
| When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed next to Me and Falls Asleep | p. 36 |
| Who Were Frederick Douglass's Cousins, and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School | p. 38 |
| A Brief History of the Present | p. 40 |
| Ode to Fried Chicken's Guest Appearance on Scandal | p. 43 |
| Magical Negro #1: Jesus Christ | p. 45 |
| Mart | p. 46 |
| "Lilac Wine" by Eartha Kitt vs. "Lilac Wine" | p. 49 |
| What I Am | p. 50 |
| If you are over staying woke | p. 52 |
| Who Speaks for the Earth? | p. 55 |
| Black Ego (Original Soundtrack) | p. 57 |
| I Told my Therapist I Tried to Meditate and She Laughed | p. 60 |
| "Parkers Mood" | p. 61 |
| III Popular Negro Punchlines | |
| Great America | p. 65 |
| Magical Negro #89: Michael Jackson in Blackface on a Date with Tatum O'Neal, 1970s | p. 68 |
| Guess Who's Coming to Dinner | p. 70 |
| My Sister Says White Supremacy Is Turning Her Crazy | p. 71 |
| We Are the House That Holds the Table at Which Yes We Will Happily Take a Goddamn Seat | p. 72 |
| Why the Jive Bird Sings | p. 74 |
| Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn | p. 76 |
| The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady & the Dead & the Truth | p. 78 |
| Preface to a Twenty Volume Joke Book | p. 80 |
| Toward a New Theory of Negro Propaganda | p. 85 |
| It was Summer Now and the Colored People Came Out into the Sunshine | p. 90 |