The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay7/3/2023 You, cousins, are the children of the ones who stayed. & the borders cut sloppily as beginner’s cloth. She avoids accusation, taking an observatory perspective, giving all credit to the Eritreans who stayed, she being one of the Eritreans who left.īetter. Girmay quickly dives into the recent history of Eritrea. Girmay begins with an introduction, “elelegy,” a word conjured up from the English elegy and the ululation sounds, elelelele, made in Eritrea and other parts of North and East Africa. The title of the collection-taken from the plural of the Latin word mare, meaning “sea,”-was used by early astronomers to refer to the dark, flat surfaces of the moon they believed were filled with water, a landscape as forbidding and alien as the Atlantic was during the five centuries of the West African slave trade, and as the Mediterranean and other seas are today for migrants and refugees. Thus Aracelis Girmay’s new poetry collection, The Black Maria-a haunting, blistering, vital examination of the African diaspora from 15th-century slave ships to Neil deGrasse Tyson-is a book of memories and seas. The brutal Middle Passage across the Atlantic is one of the most painful chapters in the history of forced African American migration.
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