The Body Family

by Hope Wabuke

Overview

The Body Family is a song of memory and revelation; it is the sublime unearthing of what has been hidden by silence and erasure. This lyrical and imagistic poetry collection tells the story of a family’s journey to flee the murderous reign of Uganda’s Idi Amin only to land in a racist American landscape. Wabuke excavates personal and ancestral history to bring these poems to wrenching life, articulating what it means to be a Black girl becoming a Black woman while navigating a diaspora haunted by British colonization and American enslavement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642596977
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and writer. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Please Don’t Kill My Black Son Please. Hope has published in The Guardian, The Root, Los Angeles Review of Books, and NPR among others. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a founding board member and former Media & Communications Director for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction.

Table of Contents

I.

If Not David 3

: Goliath 5

Tongue 7

Mouth 8

Exodus: Father's American Superheroes 9

Breath 10

Job (Survivor's Guilt) 11

And after the War They Still Dream of Things Like Angels That Shield Men from the Firing 12

Naomi after the War 14

Lamentations 15

Refugee Mind 17

The Chronicles (of a Violence Foretold) 18

II.

Figure 1 Portrait of Ruth Understanding What Became of Eve in the Garden as Her Own Body as War

Materials: Wind & Sand 25

And after the War the Women and Girls Are Still Trying to Forget 28

Numbers 29

Genesis (First Daughter's Birth) 31

Mother after the War Is Still Talking to the Dead 32

Proverbs of My Father's Village 34

Judges 35

Deuteronomy 37

Leviticus 38

Stomach 40

Ears 41

First & Second Crowns: A Reverse Pantoum for Two Voices 43

Blood 45

Acts of Erasure in the Country of Nameless Women 46

Rib 48

Legs 49

Figure 2 Mary, Called Girl Materials: Blood & Darkness 50

Figure 3 La Pièta

Materials: Breath & Air 52

Figure 4 Pièta II, Black Body as Crucifix Patterned with a Field of Skittles Crossed with Seven-UP against a Blood Red Sky

Materials: White Concrete & Lead 53

III.

Figure 5 Pièta III, after I Watch the Video of White Woman Amy Cooper Channeling Carolyn Bryant Donhom in Central Park in New York City I Have a Nightmare and Wake in Cold Sweat because All I Can See Is Your Broken Six-Year-Old Face Smashed in Pulped and Bloody Like Emmett Till's

Materials: History & Fear 59

Mouth II 60

Figure 6 The Nameless Women as a Category in ABC's Jeopardy!: A Partial List

Materials: Echo & Sound 61

Figure 7 The Nameless Women as a Category in ABC's Jeopardy!: Appendix Answer Key

Materials: Erasure & Loss 63

Figure 8 Ruth as the Nameless Black Girls and Women Who Flew because They Could Not Swim across the Water of the Middle Passage in the Late 18th Century When Thrown Overboard, Alive and Chained, from British Slave Ships for Collection of the Insurance Money by British Captains Who Had Done the Same to Their Animal Cargoes without Any Legal Repercussions and Thought They Could Do the Same to Human Beings because Black and Therefore Not Human or Even Animal but Only Things/Cargo as Remembered by Those Who Survived Enslavement for Generations in America and Still Remain the Accepted Prey of White Men with Guns Who Sometimes Have Badges

Materials: Unknown 64

Breath II 65

Breath III 67

Breath IV 69

Skin: The Only Black Girl in School 70

Figure 9 Ruth as a Black Girl Walking among the Nameless Black Women Disappeared Between 1619 and the Present by Great Britain and the Americas

Materials: Echo & Sound 73

Figure 10 Self-Portrait as Ruth

Materials: Unknown 76

IV.

Exodus II: Survivor's Walk 79

Figure 11 Self-Portrait as Fire and Oshun

Materials: Water 80

PiÈta IV: Revelations 81

Figure 12 Portrait of Black Jesus as the Naming of the Ghosts

Materials: Water & Memory 85

Notes 87

Acknowledgments 91

Editorial Reviews

In The Body Family, Hope Wabuke describes the troubled bond between abuser and survivor: the terror of association, the inescapable and rotting intimacy of violence, and the life-making work of running just out of reach, of pressing forward despite memory, despite various scars. This collection is made from gem-hard incidents that reveal the absurd gap between the truth, the tally, the witness, and what’s called ‘history.’ These narratives are Wabuke’s to till and to tell.”
—Ladan Osman, author of Exiles of Eden

“In lush, cinematic poems, Hope Wabuke’s The Body Family chronicles leaving, arrival, and the dangers on either side. The poems are taut and precise, and together sing a kaleidoscopic song of Blackness, diaspora, and coming of age. I love this book, and I learn from this book.”
—Safia Elhillo, author of Home Is Not A Country

“In Hope Wabuke’s The Body Family we are introduced to a trans-historical interrogation of how colonialism, race, gender, and religion have been shaping forces in the poet’s cultural and familial life. With poems that expose the brutal histories of state violence and the concomitant twisting of religious ideas, The Body Family is a lyrical exploration of what it means to be Black/Mother/Diaspora. But as with all good poetry, Wabuke carries us into moments of tenderness, beauty, and an unfettered love for community. These poems are an honest wellspring of how we face history in the present.”
— Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite

“The poems in Hope Wabuke’s collection, The Body Family, are works of lyric force that reveal a vulnerability of sensibility and feeling, and an intellectual curiosity even as they engage courageously, matters of family, of the body, of mothering, of racism, of cultural change, in intimate and powerful ways. Hope Wabuke, in other words, is an important voice and one that should be heard.”
—Kwame Dawes, author of City of Bones: A Testament

From the Publisher