Let’s not forget how much the social construction of race, an effect of the slave trade, was codified and articulated in the age of Enlightenment, alongside the birth of modern science. In Evie Shockley’s lexically deft, explosively punning new poem, the legacy of Linnean taxonomy is newly overthrown and deconstructed. It’s a poem that asks us to remember not only how well our definitions of the human were once historically determined, but also how their bloody consequences continue to this very day. Quack pseudoscience is chastized in the poet’s slow-fire wordplay (opposable/opposed; complex/complexion; specious/species, tender/tender). But Shockley isn’t just questioning the whole project of European secular humanism; after injecting some much needed vernacular reality-checking, she’s boldly rejecting it.
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
TOPSY’S NOTES ON TAXONOMY
your thumbs may be opposable (i’m opposed
to being under them) ~ and your communication
may be complex (colored, coded) ~ but the closer
the ocean gets to cauldron, the more specious
your current classification seems to be ~ if you
love your specie more than you love your
species, maybe a reorganization is in order ~
the darwinian emphasis on descent is quaint,
but perhaps he’s not acquainted with the finer
distinctions of nineteenth-century science ~ see,
i’m my master’s flesh and blood ~ he tends
to me, to them, as if they were his own (raw-
hide, quick kiss, intimate, hit it), as tenderly
as if i were legal tender ~ but pound for pound,
he’d never take the likes of me for human ~
o believe me, whippersnapper, i’m whip-
smarter than i look ~ linneaus’ system made
sense ~ shared characteristics is what matters
~ let me put it to you plain ~ if i can’t tell
the difference between you and kudzu, it ain’t
‘cause my plaits’re too tight ~ look at how
y’all do ~ invade a foreign territory ~ no
invitation, no departure date ~ and jes’
grow ~ Man o Man, you’re not my kind ~
[“following sylvia wynter, i use Man to designate the modern, secular, and
western version of the human that differentiates full humans from not-quite-
humans and nonhumans on the basis of biology and economics.”
—alexander weheliye]
