Boston Review Reads McCrae's Language of My Captor

Ryo Yamaguchi contributes a thoughtful response to Shane McCrae's latest collection, In the Language of My Captor, published by Wesleyan University Press, to Boston Review. By way of introduction, Yamaguchi writes, "all of his books have worked, separately and together, to articulate richly nuanced understandings of race and racism as they operate at the crucial intersection of public history and personal experience." From there: 

His fifth collection, In the Language of My Captor, a finalist for the National Book Award, takes this ongoing project into a new, dramatically realized mode, employing the constituent dramatic elements of scene, voice, and audience.

Divided into four sections, In the Language of My Captor presents a cast of characters who speak through persona poems, and anchors their disparate voices with a central memoir that is spoken directly in the voice of the poet. The first section is told from the perspective of an unnamed African captive caged in what we take to be an American sideshow or circus. The second section presents McCrae’s memoir, interweaving it with the stories and dreams of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his adopted mixed-race son, Jim Limber. The third section is told from the perspective of an early black film star known as Banjo Yes, and the fourth brings all of the voices together in a short final act. McCrae, acutely attuned to the theoretical terrain he traverses in poems about race and power that are so characterized by notions of performance, never lets the reader forget that  “entertainment” derives from “to hold together” and “captivation” from “captive.” The poems interrogate performance as a form of bondage, and explore the inherent demands of audience, drawing powerful connections between the material bondages of slavery, with its attendant effects on the raced (and sexed) body, and the cultural bondages of racism, desire, and surveillance.

Read on at Boston Review.