DARK DAYS: Fugitive Essays, by Roger Reeves
Consider the Black Square. In the summer of 2020, not long after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis and a few months into pandemic lockdown, people who felt galvanized to act took to Instagram or Facebook, replacing their profile pictures with a plain black box to signal their support for Black victims of racism. The Square epitomized that moment’s sometimes-futile rhetoric around race and Blackness. Its content-less status — political speech as the absence of any actual speech — drove home how hemmed in we were by platforms that commodified our expressions into repetitive, thoughtless forms. We swapped out ideas and conversation for memes that illuminated nothing. Everybody was talking; few of us were saying anything.
In his latest book, the essay collection “Dark Days,” the poet Roger Reeves seeks shelter from the demand for public utterance. “We live in a loquacious age, one in which silence gets mischaracterized as passive, as noninvolvement, as capitulating to subjection,” he ruminates. “Everyone’s in their feelings and talking about it.” In a world where the links between politics, speech and art are overdetermined, Reeves is searching for an intellectual practice that resists the pressure to oversimplify.
He finds his way by retracing the footsteps of critics like Saidiya Hartman and the late Greg Tate, turning to the ample resources of Black vernacular culture to theorize a way of thinking that values otherwise marginalized, criminalized and pathologized communities. “I stare, I read, I critique and think from these zones of nowhere,” he announces. These “fugitive essays” ask what becomes possible when we embrace the obscurity of Black cultural practices that live and die with their practitioners; perhaps as a result, Reeves doesn’t shy from obscurity himself when it’s called for. To the contrary, he insists on the recondite and abstract as bulwarks against the nation’s ravenous appetite for Black life.
Reeves rejects fundamentally unjust political institutions in favor of small-scale practices that cultivate community in the absence of power. He proposes neither seizing the reins of oppressive systems nor reconciling ourselves to them. Rather, he calls for art that locates liberation in quotidian moments. Spaces like the barbershop, the nightclub, the church and the “hush harbor” — secretive antebellum religious meetings that offered respite from slavery — become sites where we can hone our imaginations and carve out freedom amid oppression.
This is all inextricable from reading and writing. At its best “Dark Days” is the record of an intellectual life sustained by the Black vernacular. In the essay “Reading Fire, Reading the Stars,” Reeves recounts learning how to be a critic in the Pentecostal church. He remembers time spent cloistered in “living rooms and storefront churches in strip malls behind Red Lobsters and Jamesways and Kmarts,” where, holding a Bible on his lap, he found his vocation. At Bible study he was “allowed to raise a young hand and contribute with a comment or question if so moved,” establishing a democratic habit of reading and discussion. He first encounters the politics of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. not in a school but in his grandmother’s living room, where his mother played records of their speeches every winter. (Here I can’t help smiling, remembering how my mother did the same for me.)
In two poetry collections, Reeves’s M.O. has been to locate unexpected juxtapositions and proximities in the historical archive, inviting readers to speculate about what intellectual possibilities they might offer. His 2022 collection, the cheekily titled “Best Barbarian,” includes a poem whose speaker (Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father) wanders a poetic purgatory full of literary luminaries; at one point Ezra Pound (a fascist partisan of Mussolini and Hitler) offers his services as a guide, hoping to be the Virgil to the speaker’s Dante.
Those moments are instructive examples of how to be a barbarian in the house of Western culture, and the essays in “Dark Days” flaunt an equally voracious curiosity. “Profligacy” is the key word here: With a nod to Hartman’s explorations of “wayward” lives and the presumed promiscuity of Black urban culture, Reeves reframes promiscuity as an aesthetic and intellectual virtue. He wantonly draws connections between seemingly disparate texts and cultures, and is as likely to discuss a YouTube clip of the late actor Michael K. Williams dancing or reflect on barbershop slick-talk as he is to analyze the poet Solmaz Sharif’s experimental verse.
In Reeves’s hands profligacy becomes an ethical necessity: Everything must be thought of in relation to what it shares space with. Reeves casts about for practices that build intimacy in the face of difference, that respect what we cannot know about others, and he sits in the difficulty of that unknowing. Recounting a trip to speak with students at a Native school, he feels his status as a stranger among strangers. His discomfort becomes an opportunity rather than an obstacle. “I was willing to stand in that awkward and discomfiting silence,” he avows, “because I hoped that we might converse about the silence, the chasm between us, our people.”
Reeves explicitly rejects the notion that he’s seeking a facile, romantic solidarity. “This history of coming together with Native folks is complicated,” he acknowledges, “by Native folks owning and participating in the slave trade, Native folks buying into and proliferating racism and anti-Blackness.”
Often, though, his gleefully erudite rhetoric operates with the imprecision of simile, downplaying difference in favor of a solidarity that one senses Reeves wants very badly to exist in this world. His language sometimes papers over divergent interests and contexts in a way that disappoints. There’s a maddening vagueness at the level of grammar and syntax that too often masks a lack of argumentative specificity.
Reeves’s favorite phrases are comparative. Everything is “similar to” or “reminiscent of” something else. The abandoned Native lodge that the character Sixo stumbles on in “Beloved” becomes “a sort of commons” and later “a type of archive.” At one point T.S. Eliot becomes not just an interlocutor for queer and Black studies theorists like José Esteban Muñoz and Fred Moten, but their kin, a poet with an “ontologically Black and queer” conception of history.
In moments like those the ease that Reeves claims to shun shows its seductive face. I could not shake the feeling that Reeves was not simply casting his eye upon the literary field and inviting me to look along with him, but instead coercing me into seeing things his way.
“Dark Days” stumbles on that undertone of coercion, as Reeves repeatedly tries to map art and politics into a much-too-easy relation. In reading fiction, he argues, “We make, map and begin to inhabit a politics, an otherwise that can be exported out of the text and into the world we occupy.” We end, it seems, back in the cul-de-sac of overdetermination from which Reeves tried to take his leave.
Ismail Muhammad is a story editor at The Times Magazine.
DARK DAYS: Fugitive Essays | By Roger Reeves | 223 pp. | Graywolf Press | $26