Afterimages (1997)

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A young African American boy's violent murder sticks to Audre Lorde and inspires her to compose an intense poem entitled "Afterimages." The boy's image, Emmett till, is forever etched in the brain of Audre Lorde (Lorde 48). Not only with what happens to Emmett Till, but even with the views of society as a whole, her poem clearly expresses how distressed she is.The theme of "Afterimages" by Audre Lorde is that traumatic experiences can represent the attitudes of members of a society and can have a profound effect on the lives of young people as well.

The poem by Audre Lorde shows the reader the persistence during the early twentieth century of prejudice and injustice. The poet describes Emmett Till, an African American boy, being brutally murdered for whistling at a white woman.This clearly reflects how many white people during Audre Lorde's early life felt about African Americans. Audre Lorde cites Jackson, Mississippi, as the location of her poem (Lorde 47). For contemporary readers, since it is common knowledge, this is another straightforward way for the poet to respond to social injustice and people's attitudes.

Poetry

I

However the image enters

its force remains within

my eyes

rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve

wild for life, relentless and acquisitive

learning to survive

where there is no food

my eyes are always hungry

and remembering

however the image enters

its force remains.

A white woman stands bereft and empty

a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson

recalled in me forever

like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep 

etched into my visions

food for dragonfish that learn

to live upon whatever they must eat

fused images beneath my pain.

   II

The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson  

A Mississippi summer televised.

Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain

a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat

her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney

now awash

tearless and no longer young, she holds 

a tattered baby's blanket in her arms.

In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain 

a microphone

thrust up against her flat bewildered words

         “we jest come from the bank yestiddy  

                  borrowing money to pay the income tax 

                  now everything's gone. I never knew 

                  it could be so hard.”

Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud

caked around the edges

her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation

unanswered

she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed 

                  “hard, but not this hard.”

Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her

hanging upon her coat like mirrors

until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside 

snarling “She ain't got nothing more to say!”

and that lie hangs in his mouth

like a shred of rotting meat.

   III

I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.

For my majority it gave me Emmett Till 

his 15 years puffed out like bruises 

on plump boy-cheeks

his only Mississippi summer

whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie

as a white girl passed him in the street  

and he was baptized my son forever

in the midnight waters of the Pearl.

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year

when I walked through a northern summer

my eyes averted

from each corner's photographies 

newspapers protest posters magazines

Police Story, Confidential, True  

the avid insistence of detail

pretending insight or information

the length of gash across the dead boy's loins

his grieving mother's lamentation  

the severed lips, how many burns

his gouged out eyes

sewed shut upon the screaming covers

louder than life

all over

the veiled warning, the secret relish  

of a black child's mutilated body  

fingered by street-corner eyes  

bruise upon livid bruise

and wherever I looked that summer

I learned to be at home with children's blood

with savored violence

with pictures of black broken flesh  

used, crumpled, and discarded

lying amid the sidewalk refuse

like a raped woman's face.

A black boy from Chicago

whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi

testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do

his teachers

ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue

and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone

in the name of white womanhood

they took their aroused honor

back to Jackson

and celebrated in a whorehouse

the double ritual of white manhood

confirmed.

   IV

   “If earth and air and water do not judge them who are

     we to refuse a crust of bread?”

     

Emmett Till rides the crest of the Pearl, whistling

24 years his ghost lay like the shade of a raped woman  

and a white girl has grown older in costly honor  

(what did she pay to never know its price?)

now the Pearl River speaks its muddy judgment

and I can withhold my pity and my bread.

           “Hard, but not this hard.”

Her face is flat with resignation and despair  

with ancient and familiar sorrows

a woman surveying her crumpled future

as the white girl besmirched by Emmett's whistle 

never allowed her own tongue

without power or conclusion

unvoiced

she stands adrift in the ruins of her honor

and a man with an executioner's face

pulls her away.

Within my eyes

the flickering afterimages of a nightmare rain

a woman wrings her hands

beneath the weight of agonies remembered

I wade through summer ghosts 

betrayed by vision

hers and my own

becoming dragonfish to survive  

the horrors we are living

with tortured lungs

adapting to breathe blood.

A woman measures her life's damage

my eyes are caves, chunks of etched rock

tied to the ghost of a black boy

whistling

crying and frightened

her tow-headed children cluster  

like little mirrors of despair  

their father's hands upon them

and soundlessly

a woman begins to weep.

(Audre Lorde,1997)[1]

Summary

Audre Lorde's "Afterimages" is a nuanced, multi-layer poem that reflects the ongoing pain of one of the most violent incidents in the civil rights struggle—the assassination of Emmett Till. This 14-year-old black boy was violently beaten and killed in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 for reportedly whistling wolf at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant.

Author

Born in New York City on February 18, 1934, Audre Geraldine Lorde went on to become a leading African American poet and essayist who gave voice to race, gender and sexuality issues. Lorde's passion for poetry started at a young age, and as a teenager, she began writing. She was attending Hunter College, working through school to support herself. She went continuer her study in library science at Columbia University in 1961, after graduating in 1959.

Audre Lorde attended Hunter College and Columbia University and, before writing her first volume of poetry, First Towns, in 1968, she was a librarian for many years. More popular collections followed, including The Black Unicorn and From a Land Where Other People Live (1973) (1978). The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light were also memoirs written by Lorde (1988).

Racism Issue

In "Afterimages," Lorde aims not only to express her rage and pain, but also to condemn a dominant visual economy that amplifies the terrorizing effects of racial and gender-based violations. The media's argument of "Insight or Information" could hardly disguise the "secret relish" with which the mass audience consumed photographs of Till's body along with narratives of his murder. The journalistic cliché merely sanitized and disapproved of the way the narratives were sexualized and the photographs "fingered by the eyes of the street." By comparison, for many African American viewers, the images represented what Lorde considered a "veiled" alert. If lynching was less frequent and less noticeable than in previous decades, and if young people raised in the North had been shielded from some of the more extreme forms of racial assault, the murder of Emmett Till made it clear that African Americans, wherever they could live, they were still vulnerable to racial abuse.

Reference

  1. Lorde, Audre. 1997. “Afterimages” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
  2. Kolin, Philip C. Audre Lorde's "Afterimages": history, scripture, myth, and nightmare. University of Southern Mississippi.
  3. Edwin, Steve. Remembering the Ancestor’s Image: Emmett Till and Predicaments of Witnessing. Processed Lives.
    1. Lorde, Audre. “Afterimages”. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42582/afterimages. Accessed 25 December 2020/