Robin Coste Lewis' latest epic is an excavation of what she calls 'deep time' — millennia of Black art-making, community-building and innovation.
So ends the first section of poet Robin Coste Lewis’ new book, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness.” The “dead” Lewis refers to aren’t simply her direct forebears, though the book is rife with archival photos of her relatives, but all of our ancestors as human beings, and particularly those of members of the African Diaspora.
— not that there’s anything wrong with that book, it’s a canonical text, and I revere it. But it just would have been so easy to write about the characters and the photographs, and that wasn’t my project. My project was more about the frame that we have been locked in — Black people, I mean, but really, all human beings — the frame of history, the frame of time, all of these ideas that we tell ourselves, about ourselves, are too limited and too short.
That, for me, even as somebody who is an ancient language specialist, really shook me, and made me angry and sad but also ecstatic. Because we know that we’ve been around for a much longer time than four centuries and that our contributions have been going on for thousands and thousands of years. And so, I wanted to have these photographs stand in concert with that knowledge — my family, my ancestors, people in the diaspora, we have a history that is deep time too.
Robin Coste Lewis’ new book, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” is a hybrid text concerned with the recent past and excavating what Lewis calls deep time — millennia of Black art-making, community-building and innovation.You talked about how it felt like you weren’t quite ready to offer these people up, to presume that because you knew them at this one period of time, that you can write a succinct summary of who they were.
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