Yvette Christiansë delivered a breathtaking reading Tuesday evening at the Women Poets and Writers series at Barnard College. She is a poet and novelist, and is currently a visiting professor at the Africana Studies department at Barnard.
Her upcoming book Imprendehora is a collection of poems, which, like much of her previous work, are reflections on the atrocities of slavery. She read a selection of poems, and did so with powerful tones that varied from soft and somber to angry and tormenting. The word ‘Imprendehora’- the name of the slave ship- erupted each time it was read in a poem. Its emotional weight hung in the room, delivering an ungraspable pain.
Christiansë’s writing is marked by intense, vivid, and material imagery. In Imprendehora the cold images of stones, the haunting sounds of swallowing, the taunting line of the horizon, and the suffering bodies weave through and connect the poems, resonating Christiansë’s words that “this hurts.” Her descriptions, particularly those drawn from nature, are stunning and remarkably unique. One detects an intimate and necessary relationship with the night and day. In an earlier poem, a slave recalls that the “moon spilled a little on my mother’s hands.” Later, a slave yearns for the sun, claiming that he/she “will swallow it like an egg.”
Amidst these beautiful readings the moved audience smiled, closed their eyes, and quietly nodded their heads.
Christiansë ended her reading with a poem she is working on entitled ‘What Might Have Been.’ Before she read it, she claimed that she would “read it with some trepidation.” The poem aims to reveal the stories behind the names and numbers, detailed in an archive, of a group of liberated Africans who were being sent to plantations in Brazil. At first, I was disappointed in the poem’s style. Fragments of rich imagery were shyly tucked between repetitive, raw facts such as the name of a slave, his/her height, and the name of his/her mother. Gradually, however, the form loosens, and sensitive, intimate thoughts unravel. When the facts return at the end of the poem, they resonate with fuller meaning.
After her reading, Christiansë expressed her instinct to let this poem “stay on the page,” and stated: “I don’t think I will read it again.” She explained how careful she felt she should be when elaborating on these archives, hence why she admits that “the form” of the beginning “is very broken,” inserting “the pleasure of [her] own writing” only later on.
Christiansë revealed her troubled and conflicted conscious when she said that “maybe, in some ways, the dead must be let go,” which immediately followed with the cry, “but the numbers are still there.”
One sensed that the harrowing experiences of slavery’s history constantly haunt Christiansë. As she read from her work, one felt her effort to dig through the slaves’ minds. At the close of the evening, Christiansë revealed that she too was also digging through herself: “if there is something that the archival teaches you, it is your own longings.”
Yvette Christiansë was a delight to hear, and was certainly the highlight of the Women Poets and Writers series this semester so far.