Eve L. Ewing
1919
Published in:
The Black Scholar
By Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu
Eve L. Ewing, a professor of sociology at University of Chicago, is an academic, a comic book writer, and a poet. Her first collection of poetry, Electric Arches, was a whimsical and dynamic foray into Black life: aliens abound, descending upon neighborhoods filled with Black youth asking questions of their origins; basketball players reimagined as poetic narrators; there is a manifesto for shea butter; and Erykah Badu appears in an epigraph. Yet, with 1919, Ewing shows an increased depth with her poetry. Divided into three sections titled “Before,” “What Happened,” and “After,” Ewing presents Black life in Chicago before, during, and after the 1919 race riots. Taking as her starting point a report from 1922 written by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relation and a Race Riot, Ewing presents a case study of Black life as it was experienced and as it was documented. Ewing’s academic work is repurposed in this well-researched poetry collection. The intertextuality of each poem opens a space for deep engagement with the archive and its absences, ultimately enabling Ewing to develop her own critical fabulations of the time period.
“Sightseers,” from the second section, begins with an epigraph from the 1922 report. In the first stanza, the speaker states
I just didn’t know how else to say
that we live in a time of sightseers
standing on the bridge of history
watching the water go by
and there are bodies in the water
and the water has been dirty for so long
and the sightseers still drink from it. (41)
In this didactic poem, there are “sightseers” watching the turmoil of 1919. Yet, these individuals are marked as active participants in the riots. All of the 28 poems in the book work to educate readers about the cultural upheaval of 1919. In order to carry out this project, Ewing marks the start of each poem with an epigraph. In “Sightseers,” the epigraph notes that “Often the ‘sightseers’ and even those included in the nucleus did not know why they had taken part in crimes that viciousness of which was not apparent to them until afterward” (23). Although the quote is presented as an objective statement, the sightseers in the poem hold a dual role. They showcase the historical conflict noted in the epigraph while also engaging in a more widely encompassing allegorical performance that decries silence in the face of atrocity. Through the use of quotations, Ewing juxtaposes her poetry in light of an archive that does not characterize in depth the individuals who participated in the historical moment. The nuances of Black life as it was lived in the moment seem to disappear under the clear and direct historical vignettes. However, Ewing utilizes and expands upon the historical archive to create a poem that details more than the archive could on its own. The poems allow for increased intimacy with the archive, showcasing poems and speakers who deal with emotion, family stories, and songs.
The archive becomes malleable in Ewing’s poems. The speakers in the poems insert a new understanding of voice and characterization in the linear and narrativized history of the race riots. “Jump/Rope,” begins with the 1922 report, which curtly and directly notes that “On Sunday … there was a clash of white people and Negroes at a bath-beach in Chicago, which resulted in the drowning of a Negro boy” (xv) (32). The poem takes up this moment and transfigures it into a child’s song. The poem begins with four short lines: “Little Eugene Gene Gene/ Sweetest I’ve ever seen seen seen/ His mama told him him/ Them white boys mean mean mean” (32). The standard rhyme in lines one and two and the rhythmic repetition found in lines two and four might cause one to think of this poem as playful, childlike, and unassuming. Indeed, Eugene, a young boy, may have embodied many of these characteristics. Yet, Ewing takes up the topic of death and drowning through this unassuming form. Taking on the cadence of a song or playful rhyme, the speakers in the poem sing and undoubtedly sway from side to side as they jump rope. The song works as both eulogy and play, as both the story of one young boy and the Black children of Chicago. The speaker later describes the drowning, noting how Eugene “went to the lake lake lake/ That July day day day” (32) and eventually went “Down Down baby/ Down down, the water’s tugging” (33). His mother, who does not appear in the archive, appears in the poem: “Rise, Eugene, rise! Calm your mama’s cries!” (32). The poem presents a boy dying and a mother in anguish. By opening up the archive and working to locate the lived realities of Black people within the report, the poem “Jump/Rope” creates a new narrative of Eugene’s life and death. Whereas Ewing takes on the voice of children by utilizing jump-rope rhyme schemes, in other poems she speaks from the position of a stockyard worker, a protester, a maid, or a streetcar. All of these unassuming perspectives enable Ewing to draw closer to the lived realities described in the archive.
The poems do not simply draw from the archive to chronicle lost life and the destruction of communities. Rather, Ewing’s work is a process of radical, transformative hope. In the poem “it wouldn’t take much,” Ewing creates a “blackout poem,” a style of writing in which certain words or phrases are redacted, prefaced by a quote attributed to a man only noted as Officer Callahan. Callahan, an officer during the 1919 riots, stated in the 1922 report that “it wouldn’t take much to start another riot, and most of the white people of this district are resolved to make a clean-up this time” (56). Through this important formal process of erasure, Ewing takes an official document, specifically from the management of her apartment building after the 2018 verdict of Jason Van Dyke, and redacts a series of words and phrases. Van Dyke, an officer who murdered a Black teenager, is emblematic of Officer Callahan’s early 20th century remarks. Headlines in October and November of 2008 featured bold words like “Riot Warning” and asked, “Will Chicago riot?” 1919 displays a malleable temporality throughout the book, noting how the past is not always past. Rather, Ewing displays how the past repeats and transforms itself, and comes at us again in new ways. What is left in “it wouldn’t take much” is a prose poem that acknowledges the atrocity that has occurred while also pointing towards a hopeful anticipation. “We have been informed that the city’s will activate when the public expect[s] unrest. ” (56). Ewing shows us what is possible in a moment like 1922 or 2008, or 2020 where Black protests spread across all 50 states. Ewing speaks to the chaos of the past through the turmoil of the present: “The last thing you want is the chaos.” This poem, which brings the contemporary moment to bear upon a historical collection of poems, enables Ewing to situate two temporal planes side by side. Ewing’s book, with its almost 100-year-old historical archive, presents the tensions of early twentieth-century Chicago as being just as relevant today. What might be seen as a pessimistic reading of our present moment is, instead, rendered as a realistic and hopeful critique of our moment, and it done through the structurally aesthetic form of erasure and the blackout poem. “Keep focus,” Ewing writes. “Keep your focus on the present.” She finishes the poem with the words “[…] be safe!” which acts as an exclamative plea for the safety of Black persons both in 1919 and in 2018.
Ewing presses the past and the present together in these poems, placing them next to photographs, archival documents, and poems. The intertextuality of this project is a welcome addition to other historically situated books of poetry that have been published in recent years, such as Olio by Tyehimba Jess1 and Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis.2 1919 is a fascinating investigation into a historical moment that has been relatively understudied. Readers will appreciate Ewing’s formal techniques, such as the haibun and jump-rope rhymes, and the strong poetic voices that anchor the text. The use of historical images and the archival prefaces paints 1919 as a deeply intertextual book of poetry, marking it as aesthetically and contextually rigorous in depth yet accessible through its purposeful narrativization of a historical moment.
