Lewis’ fierce poetry has roots in Compton
LOS ANGELES—The white fence is new, but the tree she planted as a child still stands in front of the wood house, now stucco, pale yellow and cracked, forgotten Christmas lights hanging from its eaves. She laughs.
Time sucks her back, the way it does, and she talks about backyard camping, cockfights and how men dressed up in suits after dinner and strolled through Compton until way after dark, imagining what they might have become if they were another color. Not black.
It’s in her poetry, the way one’s own skin can be a terrible, beautiful thing. Robin Coste Lewis steps to the sidewalk on South Central Avenue, a half-century swirling around her. She learned to ride a bike here; the family two doors down kept chickens. It seemed then like country and city were mixed into a little girl’s idyll, before Compton became “Straight Outta Compton” and before her first boyfriend, a geeky 16-yearold, was shot and killed in a drive-by.
“This,” she said, “is the X mark on my planet.”
Lewis is a poet who won’t let you look away. Her verse reaches through racism and history; the best of it startles and amazes with vivid, sly and subtle turns of phrase that conjure demons still not extinguished. There is treachery in nostalgia, shame in a nation’s sins. Her debut collection, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” which won the National Book Award in 2015, is a disturbing, if riveting, exploration of how the black body, especially the woman’s, has been broken, cataloged and used, defined by and enslaved to the white world.
In her poem “Frame,” which reminiscences on her Compton childhood, she speaks of her mother ordering books that pretended the world was prettier than it was: “So that I could see a photograph of an uncommon colored body—besides a burnt body, or a bent body, or a bleeding body, or the murdered body of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King—Junior—… ” Lewis has the same desire for her 9-yearold son, making sure he can grow up somewhere so “he gets to not know he’s prey.”
That last word dissolves in sharp, stubborn pieces. She knows something about stubborn; it helped her survive a life-altering accident and led her to an unexpected honor.
In April, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti named Lewis, who has a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied Sanskrit, the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She succeeds the poet and novelist Luis J. Rodriguez and plans to use her two-year tenure to focus on cultural reconciliation and the stories, poetry and lives of indigenous peoples and those who have come to Los Angeles, much like her own family, as part of endless migrations. Each ethnicity that has arrived here, she says, shares one thing.
“Language is the bones of our existence,” says Lewis, 52, who describes her roots as Afro-Creole. “Identity as a fluid thing. Culture as a fluid thing. I’m not interested at all in saying what black ain’t because black culture and black diasporas are scattered all over the world and it’s such a beautiful thing. I feel like if we fix black culture, we’ll stop looking for it and stop finding it. I always want to keep looking.”
The daughter of a math-minded janitor who mastered the Rubik’s Cube, Lewis almost lost her words 17 years ago when she fell through a hole in the floor of a San Francisco restaurant. She suffered permanent brain injury that forced her to re-learn nouns and verbs and syntax. During her recovery, she would write one line a day, which taught her the power of syllable, rhythm and precision. It made her a poet.
THE AFTERMATH
“I could feel language, but I couldn’t get to it,” she says. “There’s so much about mortality I confront every day. There’s so much about aging. I think in some ways I’m aging prematurely. I couldn’t hold a pen after it happened. A nurse taped a pen in my hand, and I fell madly in love with her at that moment.”
She’s on medication and sees a neurologist. Words trick her sometimes, which for a writer, she notes, is both confounding and delicious.
“My face and hands get numb and my eyeballs feel like they’re in my clavicle,” she says, adding that she often feels she is two people, the interior she was born with and the other that came after the fall. “What does it feel like to have one self? I don’t know if it’s quite a death, but something happens and then another self emerges and they have a relationship, but they’re not the same person.”
One of her biggest influences is the late Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, who like Lewis has an eye that can turn a neighborhood into a carnival with a sliver of longing. In one of her favorite Coleman poems, “Dreamwalk,” Lewis saw herself back when she was a restless girl on the brink: “palms nod against the neon rainbow sky/ the moths come/ and the starlings/ and the dragonflies/ you know something important is going to happen/ to you/ hurry, you whisper, please hurry.”