“There’s No Place Like Home,” by Nathan McClain (Poetry ’13)
“There’s No Place Like Home,” an essay by 2013 poetry graduate Nathan McClain, was recently featured on The Critical Flame. Read an excerpt below:
There’s No Place Like Home
“Everything I know of home / Is captured by the image of a man running from / The police, his arms flailing unlike any bird you’d expect / To fly.”
Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Parking Lot”
“Maybe memory is all the home / you get.”
John Murillo, “Mercy, Mercy Me”
I watched the entirety of Ava Duvernay’s four-part Netflix mini-series, When They See Us, in one sitting. I did not intend to watch it in one sitting. Earlier that morning, I’d bought a five-pound pork shoulder from our local farmer’s market, and I planned to, at midnight, season (salt, freshly cracked black pepper, minced garlic, fennel pollen), sear in a pan, and slowly braise it in my Crockpot overnight as I slept.
However, when I placed the pork shoulder in the slow cooker, its base—where its heat and power and timer reside—wouldn’t switch on. It would take five to six hours to braise the shoulder in the oven, and I didn’t trust myself with a cellphone alarm (exhausted by the day), so I decided to wait up with it, to remain awake, as if rocking a fussy baby to sleep over and over again. The mini-series had been out a week or so by then and was on my list to watch, so what better time or excuse, right?
So, I watched. Alone. In the dark, a large yellowish moon hovering outside my window, like an idea, or a balloon caught in the trees. It is a difficult mini-series to look away from, even if one were so inclined to look away.
When I finished the final episode, the sky was lightening from a deep purple to a soft blue, the way a bruise might lighten, as proof of its healing. I’d wept hard, and felt tender as shoulder meat sloughing off the bone. Even if you haven’t seen the mini-series, you likely know the story: five teenagers—boys of color—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise—are wrongly accused of beating and raping a 28-year old woman, a white investment banker, as she jogged through Central Park. They were coerced into signing false confessions and served between six and thirteen years in prison.
The mini-series opens in 1989, but it could have just as easily been today. Donald Trump, then a real estate developer and private citizen, appears briefly in the second episode of the mini-series being interviewed by Larry King shortly after he’d spent upwards of $85,000 to take out full-page ads in local newspapers demanding, in capital letters: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE.”
One might argue these were simply words. Like inscrutable. Mayhem. Or Wal-Mart. It’s just language, you might say. One man’s opinion. And one might say the same about poems in general. These ads, however, this rhetoric, branding the boys “muggers and murderers,” played a significant role in shaping the public’s opinion and discourse about the case before the trial would even begin. These words incited awful violence against these boys, despite their innocence.
I should also say, I didn’t anticipate writing any of these details—but in setting out to write an essay on the poetics of home in the African-American Diaspora, it felt disingenuous to not consider these and countless other facets of this country’s history.
Read the rest of this essay here: http://criticalflame.org/theres-no-place-like-home/
