The ekphrastic and archival lyric poems in Ama Codjoe’s debut poetry collection, Bluest Nude, chart a relationship to one’s body and self where multiplicity allows for a surprising coherence. Codjoe turns to the body as philosophy to try to answer a question — when multiple ways of seeing create complexity and even some confusion, how can we proceed through that murkiness toward a renewed sense of clarity?
Codjoe’s relationship to murkiness calls to mind the poet and scholar Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity. In Poetics of Relation, asserting that an embrace of opacity is central to the work of decolonization and an alternative to “childish refusal,” Glissant writes: “[The opaque] is not the obscure … It is that which cannot be reduced.” [1] The speaker does not let the reader walk away with tidy clarity. Codjoe accomplishes this through striking metaphor — “I wash a plate, / polishing the moon’s face”—immaculate line precision—“I heard the silences / grow as a field of stones between us” — and narrative tension, suspenseful to the end of the poem. Glissant goes on to say: “We are far from the opacities of Myth or Tragedy, whose obscurity was accompanied by exclusion and whose transparency aimed at ‘grasping.’” In this sense, Codjoe’s use of mythical tropes can be read as forms of opacity: she turns to shapeshifting animals and clouds and water cycles, rejecting clear-cut chronologies or moralistic fables.
Codjoe’s lyric I builds a geography that extends across continents and generations, like Aracelis Girmay’s control over the line, where the longer sentences frame shorter fragments. By “geography” I mean not only the places Codjoe refers to in her poems, but also the word’s ecological and topographical denotations. In particular, the shorter and longer sentences signal shifts across space and time — memory, weather, inside and outside — thus creating new topographies. In “At the Fish House,” the speaker begins the poem with a deceptive Socratic inquiry that she almost immediately abandons, turning instead to an exploration of loss and intimacy:
I’m contemplating the difference between anger
and resentment, but I’m interrupted each time
a brown pelican crashes into the water, more recklessly,
it seems, because of the approaching storm.
The water turns field and beast, like the mind
which is also like the body: tractor of memory
raking the ground you become when loss,
proof of your heart, confounds you. Another dives.
I can’t remember what it feels like to snare
my tongue in someone’s mouth, or the date
my grandfather died. It was a Tuesday
in September. My mother woke me from stilted sleep.
Pelican chicks dive so deeply inside a mother or father’s
gular pouch the chicks were thought to be
cannibals, feeding on the blood of their parent’s breast.
To my right, lightning like a thought cut short.
From far away the pelican spots the menhaden,
which my eye can’t distinguish from water.
I get no further than the question. A cold wind
rushes from my eyes. I go inside, shut the windows.
The speaker envies the pelicans’ physicality and immediacy of intention. In the next stanza, as the scale shifts from reflection on a grandfather’s passing back to the current moment, the poem mirrors a grieving process. It is impossible for many of us to live too long in the pain of loss: we need reprieve. The speaker finds levity in a turn from unembodied loss to the corporeal, grounding in the logistics of the present: “Another dives.” And then: “It was a Tuesday / in September.” The fourth stanza returns to the speaker’s recurring desire for closeness, intimacy granted by bodily proximity, unmediated by bodily limitation: let me dive into you, she seems to demand.
Then the pelican sees what cannot be seen: “From far away the pelican spots the menhaden, / which my eye can’t distinguish from water.” In Bluest Nude, eyes and sight become the canvas for knowing, for closeness. The pelicans provide secrets of the water, the lover reveals new dimensions of the self, a group of women “construct our seeing as clay or wood // figurines of air.” Later: “I want / to be more like my eyes.” Sight acts as the impetus for change, for desire, for the laying out of a new reality. In this sense, the eyes, like the I, act as a container for uncovering truth.
At the poem’s end, the outside world enters the room as “wind / rushes from my eyes.” The line break between “wind” and “rushes” builds suspense, and the space between the words mimics this strange image. How does wind rush from the body? In this slippage, the metaphor strengthens. The poem begs: has truth been delivered to the speaker’s body or has sight been compromised? These final staccato sentences do not signal a simple refusal, or even a rejection of the question. Rather, they seem to present a relationship to death, the divine, and memory rooted in both the mundane and the sacred. We can — and must, Codjoe implies — shift between these places and timelines: here and there, then and now. The tractor lines have been drawn, looked at, and covered again.
In the ekphrastic poem “Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” Codjoe engages with a history of Black revolutionaries across generations. The poem starts with a tension, an unresolved problem: in Saar’s 1972 painting, Aunt Jemima holds a shotgun in one hand and a broom in the other. Codjoe casts Aunt Jemima as the speaker of the poem. How can she fire the shotgun when the weapon requires two hands to operate? In other words, how does women’s work relate to militia, to revolution? Codjoe’s dream of the revolution escalates as the speaker repeats the directive “gonna,” ending in the refrain from the spiritual “Down by the Riverside,” ain’t gonna study war no more. The speaker writes, on the verge of singing:
Gonna lay down my sword …
Gonna burn the moon in a cast-iron skillet …
Gonna break the nose of mythology …
Gonna whip a tornado with my scarlet handkerchief.
Spin myself dizzy as a purple-lipped drunkard.
Gonna lay down, by the riverside, sticky and braless in the golden sand.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.
The poem turns to pleasure as a form of salvation and as a site for liberation. This new revolution seems to be about laying down the gun. To some extent, Codjoe’s response is a form of refusal — living her life becomes its own form of revolution. In a September 2022 interview with 32 poems, Codjoe remarked on this poem: “The speaker’s desires are close to mine; the constraints of her life both diverge and brush up against mine. I want her to rest, I want her to experience a sexuality where her pleasure is centered, I want her to be free — even from the fight for freedom.”[2] The line “sticky and braless in the golden sand” offers a bodily relation to revolution, centering pleasure and the erotic. The revolution may happen at home, or in the sky, or at the time and place that exists between “breaking the nose of mythology” and oiling a cast-iron pan, grounded in the body.
A few poems later, Codjoe returns to this painting. In “Detail from Poem ‘After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,’” we find four different iterations of Aunt Jemima, birthed in the same way Athena was created, out of someone’s gushing head. Like Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Anniad, Codjoe writes her own mythology, one where origin stories extend from kitchens to skies, private spaces to giant bodies of water.
Throughout the collection, Codjoe’s speaker considers the relationship between nakedness and nudity. There is friction, often, where nakedness appears: a tension between the self and the person or object nearby. Nudity suggests tenderness, not as a baring of the soul or a complete melding into the person one might share a bed with, but as an intimacy beyond the dissolution of self into other. In the title poem, the speaker writes, “When you look at me, in our most intimate // exchanges, you drape my nakedness / in a fabric I neither sewed nor bought.” What does the lover drape in this moment? An item of clothing that the speaker did not have to make? Or a metaphorical draping of the eyes onto the body? This moment evokes the pieces of fabric that Rita Dove returns to in Thomas and Beulah, silks and headdresses — and in Bluest Nude, the lover creates the fabric on his own, just as he looks at the speaker with renewed eyes, giving her a new way to see herself. A tenderness abounds.
Nakedness, in contrast, seems to mean looking at one another and seeing each other fully, shamelessnessly. In the washroom as a child: “She wears her nakedness // like it’s been woven from air.” At home: “Gonna try on my nakedness like a silk kimono.” In heaven, matter-of-factly, in the vein of Sharon Olds: “Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked. / I stared into her bespectacled eyes.” At a time of immense transition: “I began to understand nakedness / as a feeling.” The speaker often examines her own body, aiming for closeness and comfort but frequently returning to the present moment feeling desolate. At one point, she tries to find ease in shapeshifting: “my hair as switchgrass, twine, and nest, / a roving cloud my every limb.” And so she becomes both necessary — switchgrass the primary plant in prairies — and distant — cloud-limbed. Perhaps the naked body, in its capacity “as a feeling,” can serve as a port of entry to deepen one’s relationships with ancestors, family, and lovers.
Bluest Nude alerts us to the possibility of wholeness and completion, where one is not alone but constantly accompanied by multiple lineages through which we may attempt to build our own homes, selves, and mythologies.
[Published on September 13, 2022 by Milkweed Editions, 91 pages; $16.00 paperback]
[1] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betty Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 191.
[2] Ama Codjoe, interview by Cate Lycurgus, 32 Poems, September 2022.