Erica Dawson's in the Current Moment: When Rap Spoke Straight to God

Jaimee Hills reviews Erica Dawson's When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018) for The Rumpus, writing that Dawson's "exploration of the contemporary cultural and political moment delves into the indignities imposed upon black life by both the state and fellow citizens, especially those imposed upon women. The subject matter calls to mind Marie Howe’s Magdalene or Claudia Rankine’s Citizen." Additionally:

With the great triggering of our last presidential election season, and the #TimesUp and #MeToo hashtags, we’ve witnessed a collective resurfacing of memories of sexual abuse and harassment, and a new willingness to speak out about them. Dawson engages with these events and movements throughout the book. Instances of catcalls thread through the longer narrative and surface as lines of poetry: “at a gas station, a man’s Damn girl, those tits / knocks me into the pump and I, too, can / be machine. Shudder. Waiting for use. Tick. _____Queue.” There’s a rawness and immediacy here that stems from the presentation of an offensive catcall as “natural speech,” coupled with Dawson’s characteristic rhythm (that “Tick. Queue.”) that show how misogyny feels in the body.

Dawson plays with many tropes—light and dark, the spiritual vs. the corporeal—while questioning the everyday myths that surround us. The journey of the spiritual is not religious or irreligious. It is nuanced. At one point the speaker declares quite simply “I seek God.” At another, the speaker asserts herself: “I can do all things / through Christ which strengthenth me.” Similarly, the pop cultural and literary references throughout function as quasi-spiritual figures that commune with or occupy the space of gods:

 

When Jeezy said____ Jesus said_____ the sky’s
our only limit, rap asked God who deferred
it to the dirt interred around the incus,
the anvil of the ear’s middle passage.