Some Requiem

I see the coming of the long green rain

Henry Dumas possessed an uncanny linguistic fertility that still transcends eras and genres. He leaps off the page into lived Black experience and refashions it, and he is not through witnessing us and restoring us to the brimming triumph of his vision. Dumas’s work—both poems and fiction—haunts settled notions of form and place, using an oracular sound and understanding that exceeds what one might expect of a man from Sweet Home, Arkansas. This man knows too much about rituals he was supposed to have misplaced on the journey over. He delivers too many exotic threats in the forms of snakes and rams and Osiris and Black gods others cannot recall without his unrelenting poetic intervention. Dumas remains so vivid and alive that parts of him—his tone and microtone and silence—still guide readers when they rediscover his work. Yet he was killed violently, abruptly, by an officer with the New York City Transit Police, on May 23, 1968, while on his way home. Society did not offer Dumas the same shield he offers us; he was taken by negligence, by our collective cold shoulder, and by the pernicious social disease of prejudice, his killing having been deemed a case of “mistaken identity.” The unconditional attentiveness in his work avenges him now. That same spring, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; that same spring, the almost-revolution ended and the United States headed toward heroin and disco. A few principal spirits died, and the whole movement diminished with them.

Dumas’s muse had not run out of forms or uses by the night he was murdered, however. He whispers the preemptive echo of that murder to us with the salt-sweet tears of his poems. His cadence continues to strike and ripple like judgement or like the illusive weighing of the heart ceremony in ancient Kemet; reading him feels like this. Are you guilty of some self-deluded gimmick? Dumas’s work reveals where you have over-complicated your listening, or where you’ve become addicted to illusions rendered by the very culture that oppresses you.

His poems sway like Mona Lisa’s gaze. They feel different each time you read them. Something in his language is alive and shifts with time. Even his short stories seem to end differently each time you return to them because Dumas himself is present in their universe, ever shifting and turning. His selected poetry, Knees of a Natural Man, first published posthumously in 1989 and recently reissued by Flood Editions, swoons with revivals. The work gestures as if Dumas is delivering it on his knees in tall grass, dictating his own lines back to us: jackjack backing back and stacking stone…scooting toward us with his hands up, shouting, Don’t shoot!...laughing, I dare you to shoot. He knows he is eternally on his way elsewhere, where the language is freer and more decisive, as if he already knew that during his tenure on Earth. The poems are elegies for the unnatural waking world, and they pave the way for Dumas’s stories, which are also being reissued this year. In his fiction, as in his poems, human relationships are mundane yet otherworldly, every character a ghost-angel, a monster, a hero, a demon, a runner, an exile, a ruler, a dreamer, himself eternally becoming.

If flesh would listen I would warn him

Dumas’s eternal return, insistently modest in tone, is rooted in intense, uninterrupted listening and in the awestruck paranoia that listening while Black provokes. He hears storytellers in lands whose gates he’s never entered and resuscitates abandoned legends; he hears jazz and projects unutterable Black sentiments onto its rituals through his use of space, pause, and cadence. In Sweet Home and in Harlem, the two places most familiar to him, he hears the speaking voices of friends and heroes—Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka, John Coltrane—and narrows them into chants, teaches them to insist with him, to enter the heart and mimic its sound in word and get rid of anything that obstructs it. In his poem “Island within Island,” Dumas writes of “the great octopus that I had slain / with our voices,” and means that all danger bows to Black song and sounding; he means to make this true by enacting it. Dumas’s poems are doing poems. They contain actions and blueprints for action, not just ideas but models and reenactments. They prove through doing and undoing.

In the title poem of Knees of a Natural Man, the speaker goes to the fish market with his father, who gets wine drunk and braggadocious until the son loses his appetite for flesh and slips into a dream where he is his father’s shadow. Later, he announces, “we must kill our gods before they kill us.” A drowsy, whimsical militancy undercuts the impulse to be vicious and punishing. “I might put the word on you but not the sword on you,” the speaker promises in “If You Behave.” The speaker in Dumas’s poems circles and stalks his own misgivings and is hardest on himself. He seems intent on overriding the flesh and becoming supernatural. Suspense undermines the whimsy because the prison-like shadow that Dumas confronts again and again in his poems is always on the verge of overtaking him. There’s a looming temptation to match wills with evil and sorrow in an attempt to overcome them—or to test how far down the abyss one can look before plummeting in. Dumas is out to renew love for the natural world, to wrest us from our worship of mechanical understanding, and in each poem you sense him risking his own soul to the task. There is a doomed glory in the writing that spills over into his life, as if the difference between being a witness and being a martyr is always on the verge of blurring. It’s as if each poem is a premonition revoked by fantasy, consoled by love. In “Keep the Faith Blues,” he writes

Yes the world gone crazy, they even talk about God is dead
Yes the world is gone crazy, some say worship the Devil instead

Keep the Faith Blues

By the time he reached adulthood, Dumas, whom friends called Hank, had a stoic yet tormented look in his eyes. His gaunt visage made him seem both ancient and ahead of us, remote and at the same time near and familiar. He was killed at just 33, but his gaze and his soul were already much older. When he strays from his ethereal poetic voice to write a series of very literal blues poems, it’s a relief, as if a man scaling the heavens visits Earth to remind us to enjoy what our bodies have to offer while we’re alive. The blues done wrong, or contrived, is useless bobbing and weaving and signifying, but channeled authentically, blues notes give us records of Black life that cannot form outside of them. Blues rhythms are safe and inviting and let us play within structures we can trust and lean on. Dumas’s blues return him from myth to the reality of the Black working class, where the mundane still reigns and romance hinges on tiny ruptures: a new wig and a day off work, endless unemployment lines yielding to daydreams, the yearning for a letter from a lost lover between welfare checks—all made to dance and swoon through the soft rhyme and repetition of the blues form. Escapism still calls him, and he responds with “Outer Space Blues,” dedicated to Sun Ra, in which he confesses

Yeah, a spaceship comin
               guess I wait and see
All I know they might look just like me

He knows he doesn’t fit in, in the traditional sense. Dumas, the husband, son, and friend, knows his intensity ricochets off the tangible world of those roles and grants him access to places most have never been in spirit. His favorite people, such as Sun Ra, are powerful outcasts, but Dumas has a wife and two sons, and his lust and ambition are tempered by duty. The common and the extraordinary vie with each other for Dumas’s attention, and in the poems, these impulses play musical chairs, displacing and testing each other, creating a tension that his language comes to rely on and relish. “Death is life,” he assures us in “Saba of the Snow and the Sun.” There is no separation between the ordinary and the divine in his world.

Dumas’s blues intonation doesn’t end with his specifically blues poems, but these poems do shock the system of his body of work and enter into the tradition of Sterling Brown, poet and Howard University professor. Dumas gives us low-down Black poetic scenes and rejects the gravitas of mainstream lyric poetry in favor of the raw, inventive vindictiveness of blues sounds that twist, like knives, into the meaning of natural being. The blues is also a way of self-aggrandizing. Just when you thought the sophisticated Negro poet and storyteller had lost access to the traditions that make stories worth telling, he becomes those traditions and uses the accusatory testimony of the blues to announce his allegiance to what he’s smart enough to know he cannot escape. A natural Black man has the blues forever. In “Mississippi Song,” Dumas writes

We will call the world by our name.
We will give the world our voice.

Dumas teaches us that sorrow can be romanced and transformed into smoke. The blues is not rooted in sorrow but in uprising, and Black people are not the ashes of a sad, shiftless lament but the dancing flames that never quite drift into night sky, eternally encircled by Dumas’s “nighthawk”—those sun men and women, vindicated beings, doomed yet reveling in impossible excess at the same time, haunted by the same animal and nature spirits that were sent to liberate them. The blues sensibility makes way for a calmer decadence and pleasure, a tone less eager to please, and through it, a rebirth, an integration of each accumulated spirit into a new iteration of what has been called the self.

“Come, it is time to be born,” Dumas announces in “Pane of Vision.” “Do you remember the sweet pain of turning around?” he asks in “Green Hill, Golden Mountain.” Dumas is always addressing us, as if we’re old friends who have crossed the threshold of bones into the West together and dream of returning to a land we cannot name except by feeling its terrain. He wants us all to turn around in unison. His poems call us toward the fantasy of feeling like our true selves and imagine where we might have to travel to accomplish that, what we will have to risk and forfeit, and then they take us there in simple disguises. We become the rain, the wolf, the hawk, the fallen angel, the serpent, Saba, river, substance, promising, as in “Kef 44”: “I shall fly to this place and lean.” Eventually, every poem carries remnants of this ambrosia, and we get “Kef/Ikef,” a series of premonition poems, a declaration that the natural man has self-actualized, has fallen in love, has lost himself, is flailing in the pleasure of selfless affection. The odes to life and promise in “Kef,” and in the series “Saba” that follows it, spill forth like a celebratory requiem. Everywhere in Dumas’s language are signs that he sensed the strange fate that pursued him and that he pursued it back, letting it gain on his ready soul.

Is there no smell sweeter than our own blood?

The greatest poets let you into the sinew of themselves. They offer new flesh and bone and blood to try on, to be in, to know. From inside the heart of the poem, they make room for you not as spectator or even witness but as the very vessel you believe you are consuming. They cannibalize themselves and you in that way and end when there is nothing left to feed on but light: this sense of insatiability and a paradoxical satisfaction with what can never be attained but must always be envisioned and demanded nonetheless. This hunt whose bounty is endless chase—this sluggish, soporific restlessness—lives at the center of Dumas’s poetry. It is the heart he knew we would devour to become part him, part of him, and part with him. His curiosity constantly reinvents him on the page. When you think he has gone to sulk in the blues, he turns to jazz to gloat, begins improvising and writing cornerless verses such as “we shall be riding dragons in those days / In those days we shall be terrible.” His poems are set to music, by Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, by rapper Scallops Hotel, by us when we read them, and they become our flesh and its sounding. We become responsible for the tenderness and the terror we receive from Dumas; there is no repudiating him or looking away from his warnings. There is no forgetting that Toni Morrison was his editor, that he was Sun Ra’s cherished friend, that he was murdered, that he gave reprieve to what he called “the motionless tears of men with troubled spirits.” The ethereal energy that propels the poems as they advance is consistently sacrificial. He announces again and again that he has somewhere to be that isn’t here, that he is on his way there in open secrecy. “[D]ont stop running if you dont see me / ahead” he instructs in “A New Proposal,” the final poem in Knees of a Natural Man.

Are we what we are?

Black suffering is not Black identity. Dumas wants us to know this, to embrace myth and romance as our higher powers, to invent doubles and speak with nature, not in self-proclaimed “nature poems” but as nature itself, the last souls before natural destiny. His interrogation of our very essence lives alongside Gil Scott-Heron’s song lyrics: “You can be so very beautiful / when you are who you are.” Dumas’s poems remind us how to be ourselves on our own terms and how to be beautiful as such. You can hear in his language that he was born in the South and raised in Harlem, yet somehow the urban ghetto never quite took hold in his imagination. His focus is on going back, on returning, on going elsewhere, and he uses southern Black modes to get there. His sound is anchored in merciless slowness, the slowness of the field, the halting slowness of refusal to be other than what one is even as he is keenly aware that his naturalness leaves him vulnerable to ambush.

What he gives us most vividly is a new and untapped Black form that combines the Blues with jazz and free verse and reworked Black cosmology. It’s a form no one can imitate. As with Monk, or Miles, it’s better to just take note and use its glorious originality to locate your own singular voice.

Some requiem

Because no one can do what Dumas does with language and tone and cadence, we owe it to him to let the event that he is haunt us forever. We owe it to him to let his work remain fable and tragedy and self-actualization and crime, redeemed by his omniscience, in his poetics, in his prose. We owe it to him to invent new forms within the ones we’ve become too comfortable with and crowded around and to chop and bend the old forms to the paces of now. We are living idle in the days he meant when he announced that in “those days / we shall be terrible.” We have denied the urgency of our era. We are supposed to cause tremors now, to “be riding dragons” now, to take what’s ours now, starting with the position of the natural world in our consciousness. At the heart of our idea making, we have to relearn to breathe against the junk currents of machines without becoming too precious to handle the batterings and rumblings they confer on the unnatural man in the unnatural physical world humans keep building and destroying.

Statues do not feel like that

Dumas joins Albert Ayler and Weldon Irvine in a territory of death that feels never-ending but apocryphal, as if these artists weren’t ready to go but knew they had no choice but to leave. Black men, taken, by murder, suicide, ritual sacrifice of the self by the not-self, or some combination that turns them into demigods and traps them in our need to continually redefine what they mean in terms we can understand. Dumas also joins Frank O’Hara, as a poet killed in his prime whose notes ring interminably. We must understand these men as forever in the middle of a poem, forever central to the craft because their voices sparked such renewals in us we are ashamed to have conspired with this Earth to snatch their flesh so early on its journey back to itself. Dumas joins John Coltrane too, as he plays on the sweetly agitated song “Pursuance”—a young prodigal hunting man who martyred himself to his need to hear life as it is, to work it out obsessively in voices that would quiet his own. In “Saba,” Dumas writes

i am catching my shadows like that
the falling of forms
is light making fantasies

Elsewhere, Dumas sheds the shadow and exhorts us, cheerfully, “let’s run / to warm our bones.” Between dreams of escape and play, and probing insatiable love, Dumas’s poems weave themselves into our marrow, our first and most mineral noises as they become language, and they are a dimension of their own. The poems feel like territory, like an inheritance of land, like the blood of the lamb, like justice. We will never live up to the dead, especially to those who died mid-song. The best we can do is act natural when they show up again as chant and poem. We can act like we know death is Earth’s great bluff and, in the case of Dumas, accept that the world in his poems—the billowing kef, the tentative but sultry blues, the wandering vengeance overcome by hospitality and romance—is kept alive by the same uncanny mystery that tried to keep him from us.