Say Her Name: Poems to Empower by Zetta Elliott

This is a collection of poetry with absolutely fantastic and illuminating authorial notes. Zetta Elliott is incredibly thorough in citing her sources and inspirations for the poems in this collection, and I really encourage parents to read them and help guide their kids through them.

Elliott pays tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black Pulitzer Prize-winning author. (Many of you will be familiar with her heavily anthologized poem “We Real Cool” -- you can see video of Brooks reading and discussing it here. Elliott’s “We Can’t Breathe” is a tribute to Brooks’ poem). Elliott describes how her poetry group with teens inspired her to write her own poetry. As she says in her introduction, “I turned to poetry because I was hurting.” One of the reasons I chose to get certified in poetry therapy is because I discovered while serving as an intern chaplain, that one of the few ways I could offer any consolation to my patients was by bringing them poetry. It did not solve anything. It of course did not take away illness, or remove a diagnosis of cancer, or bring back someone who had died, or stop grief. But poetry sometimes brought a moment of solace. It sometimes brought a moment of connection, of recognizing oneself in the words. It sometimes gave a person something to lean on. And reading and writing are, for some people, a means of coping when hard things are thrown at you. And hard things will be thrown at you, even when you are eleven, twelve, thirteen or fourteen years old. Elliott’s book asks you to consider adding poetry to your healing arsenal, a tool to help you process when you are feeling anxious, depressed, or just trying to make sense of what you are seeing in the world around you.

So many of the poetry therapy and expressive writing workshops I have done – in groups at a women’s prison and at a vet’s center, and with individuals in the hospital or in their homes – have been devoted to just trying to give people a chance to make some sense of what they are feeling through the instrument of language. You do not have to be a “natural” with words, or have some innate talent. You just have to be willing to pick up a pen and sit down with a blank piece of paper – which can instill terror in some people! And, if the writing seems too daunting, then don’t write: just read a poem, and then allow yourself to sit with it. Read it aloud if you can, and more than once. Think about where you feel the words in your body. You’ll know a poem works when you have that bodily experience. Sometimes a poem that resonates will make you go totally quiet, and other times, it will make you want to talk about it endlessly. 

I am most drawn to Elliott because of her vision of poetry as a “way of bearing witness” (2). More and more I have awareness that this is perhaps the primary role of the artist. Using your words, your voice, is powerful resistance. I recently finished reading the poet Gregory Orr’s memoir, The Blessing, and he writes that art’s way of fighting is to “stand very still. This is art’s way of fighting – not to do battle, but to concentrate emphatic being in an object” (Orr 209). I think Elliott does this in her book. As she states in her introduction, “my protest exists mostly on the page” (2).

The subtitle of this book is Poems to Empower. That is clearly Elliott’s goal in writing this book. She wants young Black women particularly to speak out about their experiences, to not remain silent about their pain or their joy. She wants young Black women to feel liberated to use their voices, and to not be afraid of doing so, even in a society that all too often does not pay them enough mind, or tries to silence them. 

As Elliott writes, the actual “Say Her Name” campaign was launched by the African American Policy Forum in 2014. (There is a very powerful video on this site addressed to Breonna Taylor’s mother by other women whose daughters were killed by the police). “Say Her Name” is dedicated to not just reciting the names of these women and girls, but of insuring that each of their individual stories is told and remembered. Multiple poems in this collection attempt to do just that (see especially the author’s notes on “Lullaby” and “Ascenscion”). 

Elliott cites the names of many girls and women in these poems, both directly and indirectly (her notes give more details). In “Free Them All,” I was distinctly aware of how many of these names and stories I had never heard. Parents: you can find journalism coverage of all of them online. (I am including this link to Bresha Meadow’s story, but it is one you should definitely read beforehand in order to decide what you feel comfortable sharing with your children). This TED Talk by Kimberle Crenshaw speaks powerfully to the the Black women who have been killed by police violence and begs the question: Why don’t we know these stories? As Crenshaw concludes, “We have to collectively bear witness … and then move from mourning and grief to action and transformation.” Janelle Monae addresses this same question in this music video, which some of you may have seen covered by David Byrne in his American Utopia, produced by Spike Lee and now showing on HBO.

In addition to memorializing, Elliott engages in dialogue with her “poet-elders,” the phenomenal Black women poets Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Phyllis Wheatley. A poem by each of them is included in this collection. 

Elliott borrows the lines “to be young, gifted and black” from Nina Simone’s song of the same name, which was dedicated to her friend, the Black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Aretha Franklin and many others have covered it. The late Chadwick Boseman who starred in the powerful Black Panther film, spoke of how inspiring the words of this song were to him as well. Elliott acknowledges the importance of the film in the dedication to her poem “Panther”: for the women of Wakanda and the sisters in Oakland. For a take on the history of the women of the Black Panther movement, please see this Smithsonian article. This photo, and former party member Ericka Huggins’ words, are particularly poignant in light of the goal of Zetta Elliott’s book:

(As an aside, I must say that what I love most about doing the write-ups of these children’s books is how much I learn in the process. I never would have discovered Ericka Huggins’ website, or read her story, had I not read this book!)

 Zetta Elliott’s Say Her Name is a tribute to the many powerful voices of Black women and girls. From the Combahee River Collective (written about recently in July 2020’s New Yorker) to the Black Lives Matter Movement to Beyonce (see her Formation video), Elliott pays tribute to female liberation and empowerment. This book is also an honoring of the power of poetry. As Elliott advocates in “How to Resist”: 

feel something

feel something

feel something