Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature by Farah Jasmine Griffin

Author:Farah Jasmine Griffin [Griffin, Farah Jasmine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Literary Criticism, American, African American & Black, Biography & Autobiography, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780393651911
Google: 8T4fEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-09-14T00:21:08.737523+00:00

Dear lovely Death

That taketh all things under wing—

Never to kill—

Only to change

Into some other thing

This suffering flesh,

To make it either more or less,

But not again the same—

Dear lovely Death,

Change is thy other name.

Does not this understanding of death provide comfort? Not the comfort offered by the promise of heaven and everlasting life, but more akin to the law of conservation of energy, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.” A people who have suffered death at the hands of their oppressors may have developed an understanding and conception of it that rescues us from the temptation of despair.

Hughes’s first line takes you aback. “Dear lovely Death”? If you have lost a loved one, you probably feel less tenderly toward death; it is neither “dear” nor “lovely.” If they suffered badly, indeed it may have been ugly. Arnold Rampersad, Hughes’s principal biographer, has noted that Hughes here might be echoing his admired Walt Whitman’s “Come lovely and soothing death,” from his 1865 elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Hughes’s second line, “That taketh all things under wing,” is a more eloquent stating of the cliché “Death is the great equalizer.” All living things die: bugs and butterflies, fish and fowl, flowers and trees. Death takes us outside of our raced and gendered bodies, takes us out of our human bodies even, reduces us or enlarges us into something other. “Only to change.”

My father, his friends, and other members of our family—their lives were attenuated, not fully realized, except in the realm of love that they received and gave. Perhaps it was because of the absence of religious training in my youth, or the agnostic training of my father, that I never had a concept of Heaven, or an explanation of death such as Christianity provides. Maybe this is why I turned to literature and song. As an adult, I have often turned to Hughes’s poem and its promise of transformation after the loss of loved ones. However, I think the death here is not only that of a living being, but also the death of an idea or a place: capitalism or the United States, for instance. The end is not the end, but a change. Personally, the poem confirmed for me what I have intuited about this thing with which I have so much experience but which continues to elude my understanding. Hughes closes the poem, “Change is thy other name.” I have always known death to be change, to be the foreclosure of one set of possibilities and the opening of another.

In The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat turns to literature following the death of her mother. She writes: “I was so afraid of death that I wanted to desensitize myself to it. Now that my father and mother and many other people I love have died, I want to both better understand death and offload my fear of it, and I believe reading and writing can help.

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