Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Boy
by Tony Medina
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Boy begins with a poem by Tony Medina offering 13 verses of what Black boys are and do and feel, with perhaps the most powerful line being “Black boys have bones and blood/ And feelings.” It is an accounting of the souls of Black folk, and, as Medina explains in his incredibly valuable notes at the end of the book, an intentional response to “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens, as well as Raymond R. Patterson’s 1969 poem, “Twenty-six ways of looking at a Blackman,” which, as the blogger who posts this poem explains, is about the interior life of black men. I would add that Patterson’s poem insists that readers move away from the outward gaze on the Black body (all too often the “white gaze”), captured, I think, by the poet’s choice to render Blackman as one word, i.e., an acknowledgment of how Black men are too often seen as a monolithic entity, rather than individual and complex. (As Medina points out, Henry Louis Gates also riffed on Stevens’ title in his 1997 collection of essays Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, which includes this fascinating essay on the symbolism of the O.J. Simpson trial and its verdict. The article intrigued me enough that I ordered the book!)
In his end notes (perhaps as crucial as the poems), Medina writes the heartbreaking sentence that ‘Although I love birds, and I am a man, I chose to focus on the beauty of Black boys who, in certain light, can be considered an endangered species.” Stevens’ modernist poem is meant to address the juncture of humankind and nature. In this children’s book, Medina posits that Black boys are perhaps what we need to be witnessing – that their very existence is in peril if we do not. There were witnesses to Emmett Till. We are now witnesses to Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice.
Medina clearly means to foster self-esteem in these short poems, but to do so without diminishing the reality of what the lives of these Black boys actually look like. And, from the introductory poem, what Medina emphasizes is that these Black boys lives – sometimes in all their ordinariness -- matter as much as any others. His poetry insists that Black boys’ lives must not be diminished.
As I’ve noted, the end notes – please read them! -- are inspiring. Please encourage your kids to really look at the artists’ photos and biographies. One of the major goals of our initiative, Good Trouble For Kids!, is to revise the children’s literary canon, to insist that schools start teaching diverse texts that reflect the faces of the children in their classrooms. Books like these allow children of color to dream about being poets and authors, and to know it is a viable possibility.
Medina’s notes are explicitly racially and socially conscious. He writes, for example, about the fact that this group of poems was originally published as “Anacostia Suite: 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Boy” in Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Life of Gwendolyn Brooks* (edited by Quraysh Ali Lasana & Sandra Jackson-Opoku). Medina then goes on to explain that Anacostia is a “Southeast section of Washington DC, located east of the Anacostia River and named after Nacotchtank Native Americans who settled along the Anacostia River and who were forced northward in 1668 due to war. It is also a historically black neighborhood of Washington DC, which is quickly becoming more gentrified.” Reading this with your child gives you the opportunity to talk about the plight of Native Americans in your home area, and to talk also of words like gentrification. (You may want to consider looking at this app that lets you put in your zip code to find out more about the indigenous history of the area where you live). These are not easy discussions, but they are necessary ones if we are to truly engage in dialogue about race, and begin to finally address these stains on American history.
*Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize, and certainly a poet engaged in racial politics. (One of her most anthologized poems is “We Real Cool”. You can listen to her talk about it and read it – what an amazing voice!)
Some of you may be thinking based on this book’s appearance (typeset, number of words to the page), that it could have been put in the 4 to 6-year-old category – and certainly the poems could be read aloud by parents and the pictures enjoyed by younger children -- but we deliberately included this book as a selection for children who could read it to themselves (and hopefully aloud, since that is one of the best ways to enjoy poetry), and who could begin to wrestle with some of the vocabulary. We also wanted to induce children interested in writing to try to tackle the form of tanka, a Japanese form similar to haiku (as Medina explains in detail in his notes), but with 31 syllables across 5 lines (whereas haiku has 17 syllables across three). Children can first be introduced to the form of haiku, and then move on to tanka, which includes the two extra 7 syllable lines (thus 5-7-5-7-7). We encourage you to have your children try to write their own, and to try to do what Medina does: have every line stand on its own. Parents, maybe you’ll even write one yourself!
RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS:
Penny Candy Books offers these lesson plans for teaching Medina’s book, as well as some others. (Note that they designate it as a book appropriate for ages 8-12).
This is a resource page for teaching another one of Tony Medina’s children’s books, Love to Langston, a biography in poems of famed Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.