Electric Arches is a collection of prose, poems, and images composed by Eve L. Ewing of Chicago, Illinois. The book’s aesthetics as well as its meaning is characterized by afro-futurism – the idea that black people will be present in a more just and equitable future – a fact that must be paraded as science fiction (or something like it) because white supremacy’s visions of the future are entirely whitewashed. The book is comprised of three parts, “true stories,” “oil and water,” and “letters from the flatlands.” The first section contains some vivid accounts of happenings as observed by the author or some other omniscient narrator both real and unreal. Several of these scenarios deal with incidents of blatant racism which inspires the quote at the beginning of the section by Assata Shakur reading, “Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions” (qtd. in Ewing 5). The second section of Electric Arches seems as auto-biographical as a collection of vivid yet visionary poems can. “[M]y hair was in a zoo. my hair escaped from the zoo and took out three officers of the law before they shot my hair up full of tranquilizers, tranquilizers only because my hair is too valuable to die” (Ewing 37). These lines taken from the page entitled, “why you cannot touch my hair,” expresses a certain way Ewing constructs her reality within Electric Arches namely infusing parts of ourselves and our world with a kind of magical realism. The final portion of the book, “letters from the flatlands,” are primarily poems and visual art dedicated to recounting childhood in Chicago as well as a few detours through unspecified rural USAmerican destinations to visit family. The ending side-by-side poem titled, “Affirmation” and dedicated, “to youth living in prison after Assata Shaku,” commands the reader to, “Speak this to yourself/until you know it is true.” What follows is a side-by-side poem that embodies the blessings of a living being, the miracle of hope for something, “green and wonderful” and ends with a mantra proclaiming, “I am alive/I am alive/I am alive” (Ewing 89).
The central issues in this book are race, growing up black and a woman in the United States, everyday images infused with hope and magic, and the importance of family and place. These issues are unconventional, yes, but so is this text. One short story entitled, “four boys on Ellis [a re-telling]” describes the narrator (gender unspecified) witnessing four boys on the curb being detained by the Chicago Police Department with “the university police…looking on.” The narrator pulls up in their car and asks, “if their parents had been called and informed that they were being questioned.” Only for the narrator, to be yelled at by the police to leave. It’s at this point, when the narrator will not leave, that they close their eyes and concentrate, “very hard, picturing the boys at home, eating cereal and watching Naruto.” When they open their eyes, the police are shouting trying to grab onto the shoelaces of the boys as they drift off into the air. The bikes also drift up, “and they [manage] to climb atop them midair, which was impressive.” They smile and sing as they fly away.
Although the race of the four boys is not specified, it’s not a stretch to understand that they’re most likely black evidenced by the academic setting. The only time I ever talked to Michigan State University police was one time in when I was in middle-school when a black friend and I were skateboarding around campus and were stopped and questioned by police regarding bike thefts. Perhaps I am allowing this experience to direct my reading, but the flavor of this book does makes it all to clear that the four boys are black. Returning to the short story, it does work in touching on almost all the central issues I listed above. The complexity of race and growing up black in the US is present in the universal relatability of this story to the experiences of young black folks, the power of the “the boys at home, eating cereal and watching Naruto,” and the importance of family and place: place being in the title and family being invoked when the narrator is talking to the police about the boys’ situation. This book does not offer easy answers not only because it’s dense and magical in its language, but because it portrays the issues in an interconnected realism – connecting racism, to womanhood, to a sense of place and finally a sense of hope and positivity. This is a difficult accomplishment – invoking hope out of the nightmare of racism – but it is achieved in this text.
The second to last poem in the book titled, “Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went On Then,” could be used as required reading for a teachers conference in its ability to quickly and profoundly introduce us to several young people as well as the staff at an undisclosed school. The first young person introduced is Javonte Stevens, a fourth grader, who is asking the gym teacher if it’s alright for another teacher to send over three students because they did not bring money for the field trip and will not be able to go to the aquarium. Another young person is Nakyla Smith, who is crying in the bathroom and then in the counselor’s office to disclose cigarette burns on her body. The clues are there that indicate the identities of these young people as well as the adults in the narrative. They indicate pain, lack of resources, and the work of the adults populating these under-resourced schools to be strong and supportive for the youth and their needs. The narrative weaves in and out of focus from adult to young person and so on, and in doing so captures the turmoil each faces in only two three pages of stanzas (Ewing 84-86).
One of the most descriptive short stories as far as characters goes is a story called, “The Device.” A, “hive mind of Black nerds,” create a machine that eventually is revealed to get in touch with a person’s ancestors. A “gangly…fifth grader from Providence,” was chosen to be the first user of the device at its much-anticipated public debut. Her school’s science enrichment afterschool program got cut, her dress is making her legs itch, she’s read and practiced the script, and when contact is made she reads the question from the paper, “to get it exactly right. ‘What words can you offer us to help us be free as black people in a world that does not love us?’” The device hums and shakes and the audience waits in a fervor, but nothing comes. The little girl begins, “’Grandmoth-‘ she began. But sound from the device cut her off, echoing across the auditorium, bouncing against brick and plaster and ricocheting in everyone’s ears. It was laughter…and the woman somewhere in America, sometime in America, laughed and laughed and laughed” (Ewing 9-14). It’s a joyous story with attention to detail both culturally speaking in it’s description of the inter-disciplinary make-up of minds to build the device, but also the young girls posture on stage being the first one to speak across time and space to an ancestor. The response is so natural which breaks from the seriousness of all those that put so much time into building a telepathic-time-communication device, and it works. The use of a young black girl to be the first to use the machine is decided by those, “in charge of communication and media and symbolism,” a great way to label the philosophers and English intellects, but when the girl is about to turn it on the head scientist realizes (wrongly thankfully), “that having a child be the one to do it was symbolic, sure, and also very, very stupid…the girl would be the first to die, and he would live just long enough to see it happen (Ewing 9-12). Ewing does great work weaving the thoughts and narratives of adults and young people in this book both in her prose and poetry. This is as refreshing for myself as it is for young people reading this book. Young people are not offered only perspectives of young people, but also the fallible and often blinded-by-hubris positions of adults. Adults are offered a magical view of the everyday that is beaten out of us by the trenches of adult life.
This entire collection is a testament to the creative resistance that is being black and a woman in the United States. “Every black woman is an artist/versed in the craft of the swift,/the game of the subtle,/the gift of the sideways glance” (Ewing 30-31). In a society that has doubly oppressed the person hood of black women there is a gesture of resistance that speaks volumes: a sideways glance! This is but a light reading of what is happening in this book. In another auto-biographical story, “Of all the hours I have spent in Shiloh Baptist Church, I cannot tell you the message or even the topic of a single sermon. But I can tell you whose grandbaby I am” (Ewing 75). This is the last line of, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Black Jesus,” a fantastic piece explaining the authors personal beliefs on the spiritual universe as well as the connections between black people in the US and the biblical stories of Moses, Abraham, and Eve. “We’re a people forever in exodus….we are the masters of the art of sacrifice…[Eve] was the first person on this strange sunlit planet to know anything at all, though she paid for it with terrible cramps” (Ewing 72-73). The author doesn’t shy away from the hard questions but invokes them in a literary way to represent the narratives of the oppressed.
This
book is marvelous. It is rooted in a
Midwestern urban identity but can transcend to an any audience that has looked
to long at trash in an empty parking lot at night time. The book documents in poetic and magical
realism, the hardships and beauty of growing up all at once. The format of the book is unconventional
revealing to young people that the rules can be broken in the name of a
creative spirit and as long as it brings positivity, justice and laughter to
the world. This book is relevant in the
United States as it comes from a conscientious voice on the bottom of the
social hierarchy of this white supremacist patriarchal capitalist Empire. It’s a voice of beautiful resistance – a
luxury that will only be afforded to those seeking another way of organizing
this world and the ways we write about this world.
(Written in the Summer of 2018 for a Young Adult Literature course.)
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