Kwame Opoku-Duku's "They'll Ask You Where It Hurts the Most"
Thoughts on nourishment.
They’ll Ask You Where It Hurts the Most
Blessed be the bitterness
at your core, that quiet light
growing quieter still,
like the dull moan that escapes
your lips while you dream.
They’ll ask you, child,
what you know of suffering.
They’ll ask you where it hurts
the most, when the pain changes
like wavelengths of light
in the evening sky, when the cries
of the ancestors ring out to you
from the ocean, when their words
vibrate in your diaphragm
like a listless, queenless hive.
You may forever, child,
feel a type of way, but you
must get up every morning and watch
the sun rise from the ocean.
Remember to love your lover,
remember the goodness
and righteousness of deep red
against her skin, the color of the ocean
on her toenails. Remember the ancestors
who praised the gods at the sight of land.
One day, child, you will join
them, on a beach in Accra,
where you will pour out libations
for those who have yet to come.
Until then, stand with your arms
stretched toward the sky. And though
termites may eat you from within,
pray to grow into a wise, old tree,
for the dignity to praise alone
the sun and rains. Pray to become
a garden, to distinguish what nourishes
us from what is keeping us alive.
I knew the moment I started writing these little essays that I wanted to write about Kwame’s work, but I kept putting it off because it is almost too great a task. Ever since I met Kwame a few years ago, I’ve been in a state of perpetual awe about his work, which is work in the large, almost holy sense of such a word. When you read Kwame’s poems — and, in particular, when you hear Kwame read his poems — you encounter a singular voice using language to tap into something collective and expansive in scope. It’s a poetry that threads itself into the eternal.
You notice such a thing in today’s poem almost immediately in the language itself: the repetition of “Blessed” and “Remember” and “Pray” conjuring up something Biblical, the canonical repetition of the Beatitudes. What I love in particular about Kwame’s work is its consistent subversion. Whether in this poem, or in his chapbook The Unbnd Verses (which you should buy), or in his re-workings of old texts — like the Beatitudes, like Ecclesiastes — Kwame always seems to be wondering so much. What is holy? Whose holiness matters? For whom is the eternal intended? For whom this earth?
I feel those questions deeply even in the title of today’s poem alone. I interpret the They who is asking where it hurts the most in two ways, one violent, one full of care. First, I think of this they as a representation of all who hold some kind of power, whether on the level of the state or the level of the personal, or all the ways comingled and in between. People whose power comes from many intersecting privileges: their whiteness, their generational wealth, their economic and political investments. I think of this they asking such a question not out of care, but out of a desire to inflict further violence. I think of them wanting to know where it hurts the most so that they can make the hurt even deeper, more lasting.
I also think of this they asking such a question from a completely different place, a place disavowed from a power, a place of communal care and closeness. I think of this they asking such a question so that they can make the hurt stop. So that they can address the hurt, ease it, if only for a time.
Already, in just the title, Kwame’s poem today is illuminating something deep and at the heart of being alive. It points out a simple, but often forgotten truth — that one mark of privilege is the assumption, always, of good faith. That one mark of privilege is never doubting that a question about hurt is a question of care. That one mark of privilege is taking for granted the fact that a question about hurt could be a question of continued, intentional violence. This is echoed throughout the poem, this notion of having to live life despite so much. I feel it when Kwame writes:
You may forever, child,
feel a type of way, but you
must get up every morning and watch
the sun rise from the ocean.
And I feel it again when Kwame writes, later:
And though
termites may eat you from within,
pray to grow into a wise, old tree
This poem hollows me out for this reason. It is wise, which is a word I almost never use because I don’t really know what wisdom means. Yes, I know what wisdom is said to mean, and I know the ways in which it has been used. But none of those ways apply all too often. Wise men are so often made foolish by power. But I think Kwame is wise. I think his poetry offers a definition of wisdom that I might seek to describe as the following:
Wisdom is, perhaps, knowing enough about one’s connection to the world as it is and as it was while also knowing enough to know that there is — not in spite of truth, but rather because of it — always something filled with mystery just outside the reach of your understanding. And what you do with your knowledge, and what you do with mystery — there is wisdom in such acts, as well.
When Kwame begins today’s poem by writing Blessed be the bitterness / at your core, and when Kwame finds a quiet light in such a bitterness, I think there is wisdom there. Wisdom enough to know that there is both bitterness and light within hurt. And when Kwame writes Remember to love your lover, and when Kwame writes Remember the ancestors, I think there is wisdom there, too. Wisdom enough to know that there are things worth remembering, and that such things exist both in the deep, generational past, as well as the wholly real and physical present.
That kind of wisdom echoes throughout Kwame’s work. In one of his poems from his chapbook, he writes: my definition of holy / changes with each loss. In another, he writes:
the only thing holier than word
is blood to belong to the river
is to belong to the infinite
is to call it a god & to the river
every child’s cry is a psalm
This constant wondering, this constant juxtaposition of the body and nature, and of earth with eternity, makes me think of another poem: Hanif Abdurraqib’s “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This,” which does the similar work of literally rooting collective identity and suffering and existence in the earth while also extending it outward, made so prescient by the lines:
& lord knows I have been called by what I look like
more than I have been called by what I actually am
I think: who is expected to write about flowers? Who creates the nature of this kind of expectation by virtue of their relationship to power? Who limits the expectation of personhood? Where do you get your expectations from? Do your limit your expectation of personhood? When expectations of personhood are limited, it assumes an uncomplicated, simplistic notion of identity — that people must write about something specifically related to someone else’s conception of their identify, that people must be, by virtue of who they are, diminished. Such a statement reveals more about the person who says such a thing. It reveals their privilege, and the way such privilege often flattens one’s ideas about the world and the people living in the world.
In today’s poem, Kwame’s writing dispels such notions immediately by pushing what is so commonly viewed as unlike one another — bitterness and light, the destruction of termites and the growth of a tree — into a kind of communal likeness and shared existence. He pushes us to believe that what we think of as true is not the fullest definition of the truth itself.
Perhaps nothing makes this clearer than the final lines, which I will remember forever:
Pray to become
a garden, to distinguish what nourishes
us from what is keeping us alive.
I have sat with these lines for a long time, and have marveled at the distinction made between nourishment and life. I have spoken a lot about privilege, and to say one more thing: I think it is a privilege to never have had to make this distinction in one’s life. I consider my own childhood, and my relationship to faith. For years, my faith was not an act of nourishment. Rather, it was part of the system and structure of life. It was a journey I made to church each Sunday with my father and my brother. It was something endured, that took up my time, and that felt, at times, wasteful.
Later, when I was about fifteen, I made a personal decision to attend mass every day. It was a decision influenced by the feeling that I did not have a home in the world, because my literal home had become a place of loneliness and a testament to violence, and that I should ultimately go and seek one out. For a couple of years, this act of faith nourished me. I desired it, and it satisfied my longing. And then, almost just as quickly, I left my faith behind for the most part, which was a kind of privilege, and found new longing and new ways to be filled.
I am thinking of nourishment as I write this tonight. I am thinking of Kwame’s work, and the constant distinctions he makes between himself and the world, between himself and the holy. I don’t think nourishment exists in the ideas of capitalism, and in the mechanisms of power that prop up the systems and structures that have denied so many people generational wealth, safety, and the idea and reality of communal care. And I think the moment nourishment leaves your daily language, well, I think your day suffers for this fact, and I think the people around you suffer for this fact, and I think you suffer for this fact. To be nourished is not just to be kept alive, it is to live, in the fullest sense of the word. Kwame’s poetry illuminates what that means. I think it means to be, and not just to be, but to be, at one’s heart, so much and so full. To be uncontained. The way a garden is: all this life breaking free of the earth while keeping itself tied to the earth, and to one another.
Thank you for the introduction to a wise, wonderful soul.