Description:
Maafa is an epic poem about reparations and the female body.
Maafa undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killed
her father and been granted eternal life.
Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes the
Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is
always in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sight
of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero's
journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing
and forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her
into all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images she
exorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.
Brief description: Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday is the daughter of Northern Soul singer/songwriter Jimmy Holiday. Her father died when she was five, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. Holiday earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of Negro League Baseball (2011), winner of the Fence Books Motherwell Prize; Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2013), a "dos-a-dos" book featuring poetry, letters, and essays; and Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2017), which she is turning into an afroballet. She is currently working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln.
Review Quotes:
I've been spending some time with Harmony Holiday's startling new book of poetry, Maafa, which is both verbally dense and free-flowing, terrifying and moving. Maafa
is a Swahili word for "catastrophe" or "holocaust," and the book's
lyric sequences are preoccupied with questions of how to understand,
represent, and maybe even channel the overwhelming history of violence
against Black lives. From Holiday's vantage, the answers are by no means
simple--at one point, a voice exclaims, "I'm reluctant to write this
shit." The difficulty of doing a catastrophe justice is entwined with
the further tragedy of its potential co-option. The result is a field of
fragments that oscillates between Ancient Egypt and "Fenty / Beauty
ambassador" destabilized but driven, at war with itself and with the
narcotic of easy narratives, and ultimately visionary in its search.
Black music is a recurring subject in
Holiday's writing, and the book calls on a pantheon of sonic ancestors:
Lena Horne, Sun Ra, Al Green, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. They are the points
of contact by which a stolen history might be clawed back: "black
music is the music of forensics // all my dead
friends come to me as songs." Resurfacings of stark violence crash
into quicksilver wordplay: Holiday's language is always restless as it
cascades over itself, mischievous and never quite pin-downable, like the
theme of a jazz chart that is taken up and reinvented in improvisation.
The words run across the page in
staggered spacings, as though written by a musician trying to hold the
rhythm of the sentence in her pocket. Survival, Holiday tells us, is an ongoing struggle, something that is fought for between every word.
--David Wallace, Paris Review