My Book of Men: On the Poetry of Survival

After the last poetry reading I did, a stranger from the audience approached me to tell me he had a humiliation fantasy about me.

Is this a story? What if I start it like this:

Nearly everyone had left the poetry reading—everyone but me, an old friend, and a stranger near the door. The caterers began packing up the leftover wine and fruit salad, so I crossed the room to gather my things. The stranger approached me for the first time. With the slick start of a grin, he asked me, “Do you want to hear my Liz fantasy?”

Does it become a story when I let him speak?

*

We all know this is a moment for stories. The form and content of these stories have varied widely, from whispering Google docs to side-eyeing Twitter asides to namings in the New York Times. But they have one thing in common that has made them what they are: they call other stories forward. #MeToo has been world altering, in both industry worlds and umwelts. But for some of us, as we have watched it all unfolding with gratitude and admiration—and even participated ourselves—a nagging question remains: what to do if narrative is not our medium?

This is not just an aesthetic question. A story can be unsafe or deadly, even without naming any names. A story has a beginning and end, where trauma may have neither. A story begs for dialogue from people whose speech has been stolen from them. It wants an Official Report even (especially) where none has been filed—if it’s honest, it wants a polygraph. If I’m honest, my trauma wouldn’t pass one, even (especially) when it’s telling the truth. And so, as always, I turn to poetry for answers, or at least a more helpful question: where to go when the limits of narrative don’t align with your own?

Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus (Noemi Press, 2018) is a powerful model of this conflict. Throughout this visceral reckoning with decades of sexual trauma, Eilbert’s speaker bristles at narrative, chronology, and the imperative to name her abusers. She is uncomfortable in the spaces of ritualized testimonial where others feel able to speak: “She attended one Take Back the Night meeting. No, she walked past one Take back the Night meeting—then she chose an alternate route.” That is, she chose poetry.

The alternate route is a poetics that negates itself even as it wants “to tell you what happened,” because it knows “Words are filthy”—“Chronology, too, is filthy. / All these men, specifically so.” The filthy men are all here in the text, but poetry affords Eilbert the space to “make” them herself, at a remove from the violence of timeline required by standard sexual assault narratives. She refuses to relegate abusers to the past tense, remaking them in the present as vile Pygmalions. “I make him just once pierced with hundreds of holes,” the speaker incants in the manifesto-like long poem “Man Hole.” “I make him to crave my every protein as I fill him with clay and stone and ink.”

In this same poem, Eilbert refers to “my book of men,” which may and/or may not be Indictus. As I try to think about poetic approaches to gendered trauma, the “book of men” is a phrase—a name for a genre—that I keep returning to with excitement and trepidation. The idea of creating such a book, having such a book to hold or throw or bury, is as blood-rushingly powerful as it is frightening. The danger, of course, is in the implied, peripheral status of the survivor, or the problem of writing such a book without reifying men’s already troubling centrality in sexual assault discourse.

Indictus knows this danger well. While it certainly is a book of men, it is most emphatically a woman who drives its relentless interrogations of language, history, and power. Carrying a book of men is not an act of centering men, Indictus insists, but a defining element of femininity under patriarchy. There is no accounting for the experience of living as a woman without the threat of male violence and, most likely, memories of it. But poetic voice lends some freedom from the double-bind of womanhood and violence; it can excise faces, dialogue, and characters out of the frame. Indictus is a book of men in which we never actually see or hear from men except as toppled idols, wordless shadows, and statues filled with holes. And yet, they are no less real for being unnamed and remade. This is a powerful balm for a moment when perpetrators’ faces appear in every other post in our newsfeeds.

The word “indict,” Indictus tells us, originally meant “to bring lawful charges against” but soon gained a second meaning: “to write, compose, or dictate a poem.” This, at a time (the late 14th century) when “poetry meant a fable or tale in verse,” points to a confluence of the literary imagination and judiciary testimony that is familiar to our own court systems: “It was left to the imagination of the survivor to alternate the course of events.” This etymology is a pulsing and punishing undercurrent beneath a series of poems that not only set out to reckon with one woman’s abusers outside of judicial frameworks, but also to excavate the ancient and religious mythologies that have made such men for millennia.

Eilbert’s transhistorical fantasies lift up the curtain of the West’s oldest stories, namely the Hebrew Bible, to reveal what goes unsaid in any story—that is, literally, indictus, the Latin for “not-said.” In “Testament Thrown atop an Altar,” Eilbert emphasizes the silence of the animal in sacrifice narratives: “It is a story / the way the animal strung upside down is worthwhile, to cut a / loving seam to wash the organs of our chosen goat.” Though the book undertakes an upheaval of biblical proportions when it comes to the distribution of power and silence, there is no oversimple feminist utopia to be found in this mythology. Dismissing the fantasy of a clean break from history, Eilbert writes, “Even if men have been removed, there is still / the foundation of men. Stone devotion.”

A book of men, then, is not simply a list of men, but an accounting of the myths of men’s power. This includes the tired myth of the “perfect victim,” which crumbles under Eilbert’s refreshingly muddy poetics of desire: “What if I told you that I enjoyed it at the time? / I was seven. Or I was six. I was thirteen. I was fourteen. / I was twenty-three. Would you disabuse me?” These are not the stories we are used to hearing, because they aren’t stories. They are complex negotiations of embodied memory, delayed and ongoing emotional processes, not bounded by narrative time. They are much closer to what many of our bodies and minds have felt than the stories we are able, or compelled, to tell about what happened to us. “The court spilled out of me even as I held it,” says Eilbert’s speaker. Here, indictus, the unsaid, is closer to the real than the indictment can possibly be. This friction with the practical or judicial functions of narrative is at the core of what I am now calling a genre, one whose contemporary canon is blossoming alongside an explosion of sexual assault narratives.

To this canon I would add Khadija Queen’s I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017)—precisely because it seems like a departure from the definition I just gave, in two significant ways. It is, quite explicitly, a “list of men” that traffics in individual naming, and that furthermore calls itself a narrative. Each poem in the collection describes an encounter that the speaker, or her sister or mother, has had with a male celebrity, ranging from the motown era to the present. If we take Eilbert’s book to represent poetry’s power as an alternative and antagonist to narrative, we might see Queen’s as representing a far pole of the genre’s possibilities: poetics as narrative’s co-conspirator in seeking justice outside carceral forms. No story in this book of poems reads like testimony.

The micronarratives that make up I’m So Fine run the gamut from thrilling to creepy to downright harrowing, with moments of real kindness and electricity that provide respite from what feels like a bullet-car ride through the risks of being a girl-woman. Between the rapper 1/2 Dead and his “degenerate entourage” who leer and grope at the women working on their video shoot, the “homeless man on the La Brea bus” who did to the poem’s speaker what a certain celebrity president has bragged about doing on tape, the thirteen-year-old girl trying to get into Tupac’s hotel room, and the comedian who invites two young girls to an apartment “party” consisting of two men, it’s a relief when the power dynamics occasionally turn toward play rather than predator-prey. Like when MA$E pulls the tired old move of telling a woman to smile on an Atlanta dance floor:

MA$E walked up to me & said Why you mad at me I thought that was kind of silly so I said I’m not mad at you honey I was in really good shape two years into military service & showed off in a white crop top black silk pants & pearl choker I had my curls all tight with AmPro & right now I am laughing at myself

The narrative here is overarching as well as episodic: Queen’s speaker graduates from teens and twenties occasioned by starstruck run-ins with actors, musicians, and athletes at L.A. malls and nightclubs to a self-assured life as a single mom turning forty. “40 is so cool,” she reflects in the final poem before the postscript, “40 is seeing & knowing not seeing & wanting.” Yes, here, there is a story, but there is also a myth: an odyssey of a woman navigating decades’ worth of corporate gods and monsters to finally arrive at home in a body “free of men,” “unassailed by tenderness or roughness.” It is not a story any court would entertain.

This is where I’m So Fine really lands as a book of men: when Queen gets into the details of what happened with individual men, what the reader expects to be a story often dissolves, obfuscates, or winds into other stories. When the poem gives up a name, a feeling, the story withholds details, evades interrogation. When the story provides a timeline, the poem can’t pick its perpetrator out of a lineup. Big names become insignificant; significant threats remain unnamed. An innocuous meeting with DJ Quick veers into a friend’s violent encounter with an anonymous boxer. The speaker glimpses DeVante from Jodeci at the mall while “ditching science because the teacher was a perv”—but it’s that glimpse that carries the story, not the abusive teacher. Chris Tucker, the main character of one story, makes Queen’s speaker slightly uncomfortable by leaning too close and asking if she has a boyfriend, to which she adds with an air of the incidental: “I did actually that boyfriend would rape me later that week right behind my apartment.”

Narrative details are as meticulously managed and withheld here as they are in Indictus. Like Eilbert’s collection, I’m So Fine is a book of men that takes control over which men appear and in what form; the woman at the book’s center is the arbiter of what is disclosed. Queen writes of one relationship, “& so much happened between us I could write a book about it but I’ve lost interest in pain.” This list should not be understood a testimony of the speaker’s traumas. Though trauma has a place in it, the reader is not entitled to a complete accounting. Even this self-described narrative refuses to accede to the juridical myth of the full story.

This is not the only myth at play in Queen’s collection, of course. The myths of celebrity personalities and Hollywood glamour are shored up or shredded at every turn, and the demolition of idols comes at an emotional cost that is inseparable from the bodily experience of being preyed upon. Moreover, the additional predatory drives of racism can make victim-perpetrator distinctions not just difficult, but deeply painful, to discern. Reflecting on the downfall of Michael Jackson, Queen’s speaker rapid-shifts from rage to adulation to grief in a wrenching cry: “MJ seemed like betrayal like here they go trying to take everything from us again our geniuses our heroes our talents our loves & if it’s true it hurts it hurts it hurts.” This brand of hurt is the broken but still-beating heart of these books of men: the revelation that someone who can make you feel special and protected can make you vulnerable with the very same power.

It should come as no surprise that this dissolution of protection drags the myth of the father down with it. Queen writes of her alienation from her father in the wake of violation: “the first time I was taken from myself my father asked me what I had learned and this is what I learned. I learned I had no father but could walk in the rain and let my hair rise up in the night become a black halo.” Meanwhile, Eilbert recalls the breach in connection that arose when her father demanded she disclose her abusers: “My dad texts me and asks me to name all the men in my book of men. / I drop my phone into the Sound in reply.” These books of men can never be complete, because the betrayals that give rise to them are never confined to the role of perpetrator. The well-intentioned are instruments of trauma, too.

This is, I think, what sets these new mythologies apart from the other feminist poetics they draw from. Though confessional, their “I”s are more elastic and transmutable, their injuries more collectively dispersed, than Plath’s or Sexton’s. Though odyssean, they are not the anti-masculinist epics of Alice Notley or Anne Waldman. There is, in both books, a hearty dose of the mundane—an oversaturation with quotidian male power that verges on boredom. Even as Eilbert’s speaker is alternately being violated by men and overseeing their downfall, she is reading Aldous Huxley, she is watching Girls Gone Wild, she is fantasizing about producing a popular reality show called How Weak Is Your Moral Constitution? One of Queen’s more harrowing encounters with a famous acquaintance ends with the following rumination on tired old flirting turned threatening: “why couldn’t this all only be about name-dropping & brand names & puddintang ask me again I’ll tell you the same.”

This emphasis on the everyday nature of sexual violence, both normalized and demoralizing, is crucial at a moment when the mainstream is finally beginning to understand it as mundane. What we are reckoning with as a culture now is that it’s not just that, for some people, sexual violence is a routinized part of existence, but also that what gets called regular social and sexual activity is often violent, and not recognized as such. There are more Aziz Ansaris and Junot Diazes than there are Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys.

The new books of men account for this range of violation without flattening their differences, as survivors are so often and so wrongly accused of doing. To ignore these differences in the movements of bodies, the undulations of power, the speakability of acts, the possibility of names, would be to betray the survivor who makes and is made by the book of men. This is an expansive feminist poetics that allows for both the accretion and erosion of experience, a grammar of and/but that accommodates the utterly unstandardizable and nonlinear nature of trauma. “And out of the blank of the gap of the verb of my life, I again present my men,” Eilbert writes. That again is where so many of our books begin.