By Dr. Elizabeth Kim

All the Stars Aflame, Malik Abduh’s debut poetry collection, is a lyric reimagination of what it means to bear witness. It does not merely tell history but inhabits it by animating the voices of those who were victims of racial injustices. Part I of the collection presents a historical timeline of racial violence in 20th-century America while Part II presents snapshots of the poet’s personal history, which is one that has inevitably inherited the national history chronicled before it. Abduh’s poems have a cinematic quality in the way they transport the reader to the very cities, spaces, and eyes that saw black men brutalized, black neighborhoods torn down, and revolutionaries like Malcolm X. and MLK Jr. assassinated. The poems bring us uncomfortably close, prompting the reader to confront the disturbing realities of race relations in the US and, importantly, to question why these events still continue to happen today.

“Through Abduh’s chronology, readers are attuned to the correlations between the racist ideologies that fueled America’s beginnings and their ongoing manifestations in the present. “

The title All the Stars Aflame invokes a letter that James Baldwin wrote to his nephew on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Just as Baldwin in the letter acknowledges the long history of racism in America while also envisioning change, Abduh’s poems hold together unsettling juxtapositions of a desire for the fruition of life against the cruel repetitions of history and the nation’s inability to learn from them. For instance, in “Chicago, 1919,” a stanza describing a young black boy with the self-proclaimed “strongest lungs in Chicago” swimming in Lake Michigan is followed immediately by a stanza describing his lifeless body floating in shallow water after having his skull cracked open by a stone thrown by white boys.

Chicago, 1919

I

When the Windy City spread
the noon oppression, we bobbed & splashed in Lake Michigan.
Along 25th Street, we dove & watched to
see who could hold their breath the longest.
Little Eugene always snuck a gulp of air & said,
I got the strongest lungs in Chicago.
We laughed & dunked him under to make him prove it.

He floated dead man across the lake to the spot
where the sweet water gets muddy,
where the white boys yell us niggers
are dirtier than catfish,

where one of them threw a stone & cracked
Eugene’s skull like a dry plum pit, where he
floated dead man in blood-clouded sweet
water, & tried to sneak a hundred gulps of air
into the strongest lungs in Chicago.

“Osage Ave.” makes only brief mention of the bombing of a black neighborhood in West Philadelphia while recounting the everyday escapades of the speaker and his cousin wrestling, running to the corner store for snacks, and comparing comic book characters. In these quick turns, we glimpse not so much an apathy toward such events but the will to survive despite their frequency. And therein emerges a critique of a dominant racial imaginary that is only able to conceive of dignity for one race at the expense of another

.

We spilled off the porch into the heated
May evening & sprinted up Tasker Street
around the corner to Two Guy’s
to buy Tastykakes, Boston Baked Beans,
& Lemonheads. Whenever the door jingled,
Mackey never took an eye off us; he always
mumbled through cigarette smoke that
South Philly boys were born crooked.
I bought a pickle from the murky jar on the counter
& listened to the old heads huddled around
the 14'' Emerson on milk crates. They guzzled
Old English in twisted paper bags & slurred
at the scene on the TV— a furnace-black cloud swelling
over West Philly, fire trucks parked along the block,
hoses coiled.

They done dropped a bomb on them niggers.
I tore the top off my Lemonheads & shook
some in my mouth. Leaving the store, we headed
to the stoop to pitch quarters,
arguing over who would win a rumble
between the Hulk & the Thing.

Through Abduh’s chronology, readers are attuned to the correlations between the racist ideologies that fueled America’s beginnings and their ongoing manifestations in the present. We see all the more clearly in “Attica, 1971” how a prison in New York is a modern-day extension of a slave ship, “The hole is the hold of this ship; you hear the waters / rush beneath you & plan an escape from your skull.” Or how the folly of the bigotry that justifies the burning down of Black Wall Street, as recounted in “Tulsa, 1921,” is part of the same kind of logic that replaces a black schoolboy’s laughter with the paranoid fear of an illusory knife in his hand, as portrayed in “New York, 1964.”

From “Tulsa, 1921:”

Men drove into Greenwood with oil rags to set
Fire to the world, pointed their rifles at firemen
Who could only hold their hoses & watch as Black
Wall Street burned.

From “New York, 1964:”

Was it only a schoolboy’s laughter that sparked
New York? & where was that knife Lt. Gilligan
said he saw? The same knife in the hand of every
boy the police shot in New York. Boys whose stories
they scratched in notepads.

“But rather than resorting to didacticism, All the Stars Aflame allows memories to retain their unresolved complexity.“

This logic imagines black boys as men, black men as beasts, and black beasts as punishable by death; yet, as we see in “LA, 1992,” it somehow acquits the four officers who were caught on camera beating Rodney King. When this trajectory is presented through the lens of poetry and we read a line like “Can’t we all get along?” punctuating a description of “a hundred buildings turn[ing] to ash” in riot, we recognize the feigned innocence of such a question that essentially asks its addressees to quietly accept their subjugation—its motivation so glaringly obvious that it prompts—as the stand-up comedian Richard Pryor did—the kind of wry laughter that involuntarily escapes from the body in response to absurdity.

Pryor’s influence upon Abduh’s narrative proclivity is also evident in Part II of the collection, which presents episodes from the poet’s own life. A prominent thread that runs throughout the section is that of fathers and fatherhood. But whether it pertains to Abduh’s recollections of his father before his death, literary fathers like Walt Whitman, or the poet’s own role as a father to his young daughter, none of these lineages are without their share of complications. Like Part I, these autobiographical poems also candidly recount the past with an edge of dark humor in the least expected moments. For example, “Looney Toons” likens the antics of cartoon characters Yosemite Sam and Jerry to scenes of domestic violence inflicted by his father, a figure whose appearances are nearly always paired with Southern Comfort whiskey. Abduh further portrays the power of imagery in “Doll Baby,” where he realizes that when his daughter asks for the “pretty” Barbie in the toy store, she too wants to have “honey hair & crystal eyes/ like Cinderella, snow white.” Though terse, the poem not only criticizes the racialization of beauty, but also evokes an honest sense of despair at the world he must help his daughter navigate—a world that has already taught her to reject herself.

But rather than resorting to didacticism, All the Stars Aflame allows memories to retain their unresolved complexity. As Abduh admits in “Word Problems,” where his younger self imaginatively pursues the backstory rather than the correct answer to a math problem: “you have no interest in the numbers, only the narrative.” Attending to seemingly marginal storylines lends a necessary element of pathos that is often absent from the larger collective narrative. “Graveyard of Poets,” for instance, appears at first to be about teaching Walt Whitman to an unenthused student from Camden, but instead of a lesson on Leaves of Grass, Abduh presents a reflection on the common fate yet different legacy of the student’s brother, who is buried in the same cemetery as the 19th-century poet. That this poem follows immediately after “The Lincoln of Letters”—which calls out the bald racism of Whitman’s prose and the Western literary canon—demonstrates the ambivalence of a black poet within the field of American poetry as well as his much-needed voice within it. Through it, we hear the stories that tell us what America truly is.

Elizabeth Kim is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Haverford College, where she teaches courses on Asian American literature, the graphic novel, and creative writing (poetry). She earned her PhD in English Literature from Temple University and her MFA in Poetry from the Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University-Newark. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Platform Review, The Stillwater Review, The Waiting Room Reader, American Book Review, and elsewhere.