E. Hughes
Giving Voice to "Silent Casualties"
A Dialogue with E. Hughes
with Robert Stalker
The subject of The Great Migration, the mass exodus of African Americans from the American South to the North and West following World War I, offers a rich vein in African American literature and the arts, from Jacob Lawrence’s brilliant Migration series (1941) to the songs of blues masters like Muddy Waters, Ma Rainey, and Howlin’ Wolf to the poetry of Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Bennett, and, of course, Langston Hughes. The latter’s poem “One-Way Ticket” (1949) pays homage to the generations of Black Americans who left behind their lives in the Jim Crow South looking for what they hoped would be a more tolerant environment in the North and West Coast:
I pick up my life
And take it on the train
To Los Angeles, Bakersfield
Seattle. Oakland. Salt Lake.
Anyplace that is North and West — and not
South
E. Hughes’ debut poetry collection, Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books, 2024), centers on similar subject matter to powerful effect. A doctoral student in philosophy at Emory University, focusing on Black aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism, E. Hughes earned their MFA+MA from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. E. Hughes was a finalist for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, a semifinalist for the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest, and a Cave Canem Fellow.
Divided into three parts, Ankle-Deep mixes the personal and the political, the confessional and the historical, into a seamless and stirring set of lyric poems that provocatively explore issues of family, race, and historical trauma. (An epigraph from Saidiya Hartman—“History [is] an open wound”—prefaces the collection.) Highly autobiographical lyric poems comprise the first and third sections, tracing the narrative of a family’s move from the South to the San Francisco Bay area in the forties and fifties, registering the inescapable racism the family experiences over a generation. These two autobiographical sections bookend a section entitled “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant,” a series of poems delivered in the voice of Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814-1904), a Gold Rush era entrepreneur, activist, and abolitionist. This strategy of playing the personal against the historical recalls some of the best poets working today, such as Natasha Trethewey, whose own words provide the epigraph to the last section, Claudia Rankine, and Nigerian American poet and memoirist Hafizah Geter. The voice and perspective of Ankle-Deep are entirely Hughes’ own — vivid, immediate, and plangent. It’s a startlingly original contribution to this rich tradition.
Robert Stalker
Atlanta, Georgia
September 2024
E. Hughes's great-great-aunt
Robert Stalker: The poem that opens your powerful new collection, Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, is an example of ekphrasis, in which a poem describes a work of visual art. Can you tell us why you chose to begin the collection by engaging poetically with a photograph? Would you say that you have an interest in ekphrasis as a poetic form, generally?
E. Hughes: For this collection, I conducted a lot of archival research regarding mid-19th Century and mid-20th Century California. Those photos taken by the early iterations of the camera enabled me to imagine what it may have been like to be Black and at the precipice of a world that embraced the technological advancement of the industrial revolution and the unforeseen consequences in the struggle for Black freedom before and after the emancipation. To quote Amiri Baraka in Blues People, “The period of Reconstruction…was an especially confusing time for the newly freed slaves.” In Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, I aimed to understand the full extension of that chaos and confusion that comes with what Saidiya Hartman calls the “nonevent” of an ineffective emancipation. In the book, I attempted to touch a mostly immaterial history, and photographs were a portal through which I could touch or approximate myself closer to a feeling of loss or dispossession.
In the case of the title poem, which opens the book, the photograph of Black women smiling and standing in the Pacific or one of its northern California bays helped me locate myself within a Bay Area landscape that was made foreign to me by the sheer power of time. The photograph helped me enter into that extension of loss as a 21st Century observer. Thus, for the entirety of the book, the ekphrasis as it relates specifically to the photograph (which is not quite always a work of art but always the work of life and despondency) became a regular practice of tending to the archive or what Hartman calls, in her infamous essay “Venus in Two Acts”—critical fabulation.
RS: Aside from these examples of ekphrasis in the collection, you evoke a variety of poetic forms, including elegies and dramatic monologues or persona poems. One poem explicitly references Louise Glück. Can you discuss your approach to intertextuality and poetic tradition? Who are some of your personal poetic touchstones?
EH: For me, reading, of all sorts, is a poetic practice. Especially early on when I was trying to learn how to write successful poems, I found that I must allow myself to be taught by a certain tradition of poetry—mostly the confessional and the historically oriented—in order to help myself achieve an articulation that felt like my own. Particularly, Audre Lorde’s love poems (which are not often mentioned), Robert Hayden’s quiet and subtle lyrics, Ed Roberson’s musical pastorals, Patricia Smith’s sonic cathedral of marching-on sounds, and Nikky Finney’s subtle yet sharp lyric blade allowed me to inhabit my own voice. In this book, I was desperate to find the sound of my own voice and the ground of my own poetic experience, and these writers gave me permission to descend into the most painful parts of my voice and life.
RS: The collection is structured around three distinct parts that cover poems of a more personal nature playing off against a middle section devoted to reflections in the voice of the historical figure of Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814-1904), the African American financier and abolitionist. In what ways do you think your poetry is recovering what you call in the poem “I Ran Until I could No Longer,” “the silent casualties”?
EH: In so many ways, the entire collection is about silence, about what is unsayable—but also what happens when we pursue, in literary language, the opening of silence. I did not discover Mary Ellen Pleasant, who was also called “Mammy Pleasant,” until I started doing archival research. Her story and the lack or certainty around it gave me an opening to talk about slavery and anti-blackness beyond the idiom of the Antebellum South. So much of what I wanted to say in this book about the interplay between racialized and domestic violence truly solidified in the voice of Pleasant: How does one love another while a slave? How does one unmake themselves of violence? How does one live in the heartbreak of losing a mother that you never had? By the end of “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant,” all I could hear was a certain kind of moaning. The word shredded upon impact of the page, and the sound became the poem and the absolute meaning of it. It flew something like a sharp aria.
So much of what I wanted to say existed beyond words—and it still does. Thus, the poems had to become something more profound than the abject failure of language—they had to become about the role of affect and one’s attempt to find ground for a certain kind of violence exiled in prosaic language. My poems in the Blanchotian sense embrace that realm of an opening of nothingness, which is to say they embrace a certain uncertainty—an empty fullness.
RS: Strong, elemental imagery runs throughout the collection. Particularly vivid and provocative is the play of light and shadow. Sometimes in the poems, light doesn’t bring awareness or insight but blinkered vision. How does this imagery relate to what the poem "Neglect or Baptism Listicle" calls a “straining to see the world”? What might be the relation between seeing, seeing too much or too soon, and what the opening poem calls “the cruel way that light obscures pain"?
EH: So much of this book is an argument against the light—and an embrace of darkness. Obviously, this is a critique (for better or for worse) of the metaphors of light—as pure, as reason, as hope, as consciousness, as salvation—and darkness—as sin, as unreason, as unknowable, as grotesque, as unthinkable—that dominate the popular and literary imagination. Because my book explores that way structural anti-blackness has made it possible for interpersonal violence to exist between people who suffer beneath its subjugation, light—whiteness—can never be a source of balm; in fact, it is the condition under which this kind of domestic violence between Black people suffering external violence is possible.
In the book, each speaker suffers the violent alienation of anti-blackness, of non-relation, and an inner alienation provoked by the domination of this light. Progress is no salvation, neither is the world that we see and know. What I have tried to do instead is present a poetics in which we embrace that there is nothing for us in the light of understanding.
RS: One of the other very resonant recurring images of the collection is water, evoked in a number of poems. Why is water such an important image in the collection?
EH: While writing the book, I thought hard about what it would have meant to be brought to the United States through the transatlantic slave trade. What it then would have meant to be a Black slave walking, in most cases, to California as a way to pay for yourself. What it must have meant to look at the Pacific Ocean only to realize you are trapped—that there is no possibility of return. Water is a source of disappearance—a kind of ontological loss that permeates Black being. The image of water, in my mind, operates as a limit that cannot be traversed or overcome. Water, our oceans, are some of our final mysteries and strengths that we do not understand. But what I understand is that there have been Black slaves who disappeared in both the Atlantic and Pacific—and both are unceremonious graves. Just like the North, the West is not a place of hope for the Black people who fled from the South seeking rest. To me, both oceans that surround and define the United States are implicated in Black disappearance.
RS: The poem “At Her Feet Tap the Brass Pedals” speaks of “the chasm between mother and daughter.” Chasms, ruptures, fragments, shards, and aporetic moments occur on almost every page. Graphically, some poems have deep caesurae in the middle of lines, cutting them visually in two. Can you talk about your interest in what you call “a collection of fragments”? How is the idea of the fragment important to your work, thematically and formally?
EH: When I began to think about writing this book, I thought a lot about trauma and the effects of it, and fragmentation was a preliminary way of thinking about the separation that many of the speakers experience. However, as I began to write the book, the caesura became almost a monument of an experience that was lost either to history or too big a burden for the mind. In many ways, I am a formalist at heart, but I quickly realized that where and when the form failed it needed breath or caesurae. This allowed me to go with the music of the poems instead of a strict adherence to content in a direct sense.
Still, this idea of fragmentation—of separation—really became evident in my archival pursuits, as I found myself with fragments of pictures, letters—fragments of time tucked into old wallets and shoe boxes. Mark Doty says in “Souls on Ice” that our metaphors “run out ahead of us, they know before we do.” In so many ways, pursing a largely unknown history, systemic violence, and domestic violence brought me to fragmentation and the caesurae. The depths of this silent ruin were all around me as I wrote Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water.
RS: The last piece of the collection is entitled “Births and Deaths: A Chronology.” Historical, red-letter dates, such as “1850: California Slave Law enacted” or “2004: Facebook Moves to Palo Alto,” sit idiosyncratically alongside more personal, individual events, such as “1988: Tim enlists in the marines” or “1996: Kim files for divorce.” What relation does this "Chronology" have to the rest of the collection? How should we understand the intersection of the historical and biographical?
EH: By the end of the collection, I began to write an argument against time. At the end, it wasn’t just language’s failure, America’s failure—but the failure of time to provide me with a certain standing. While this book began as a poetic experiment, interested in the interplay between familial violence and corporate violence, it ended with threads of time and lost lives. I was counting the dead.
Yet, the chronology (the form which a brilliant friend of mine suggested) is supposed to operate as an informal genealogy, the kind that exists at the front of a grandmother’s bible, an informal census. Still, I wanted to put these infamous lives alongside their historical congruent events to produce the jagged edges what one may call history. The chronology, these births and deaths, function to question the cleanliness of the past. If one really looks back, accepts that there are things lost that will never return to us—and if they do, it will be as ghosts, fragments, murmurs, caesurae—she will not be able to trust what seems to be the steady ground of time. Putting the collective memory alongside the lives of my family was a way for me to say We were—we were here.
Black Women Standing Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water
c. African American Museum and Library, Oakland 2019
The likeness of four women is rendered mono-
chrome on a white banner—the floral
patterns on their cotton dresses and their straw
sunhats, ornamented in satin ribbons,
are obscured by shutter and light. Their long sleeves
gather loosely at the elbow giving time away—
perhaps the photo was taken in the 1920s or 30s—
some forty years before my grandparents became
migrants. The women stand ankle-deep in Pacific
water, perhaps on an eastern shore
of the San Francisco Bay, hands pressed
to their caps, careful not to let the diablos
winds catch their hats, careful not to allow
a determined sun on their brown faces.
It looks as if it were a clear day—perfect
to capture this moment: a hill slowly
ascending and waning, the sagebrush grasped
in wind blowing gracefully toward tightly
packed sand, saltwater rippling gently against
the petite banks of the women’s ankles.
Each’s happiness seems simple—a warm day
by water miles from Jim Crow and history.
Now as I stand, my neck craned for my need,
looking toward this past, I want
these women to tell me something new of survival—
of the cruel way light obscures pain. In this photo,
I see mostly my dispossession—the buried story
of the west’s fathomless past—ordinary, opaque
with all of it rupturing.
Previously Published in Jazz and Culture
Historiography
c. Redwood City 1950
The redwoods careen over the Santa Cruz
Mountains with the compulsion of
stampeding herds. The expanse of pine,
green as ache, splinters from the ground
like shrines erect for a god full of promises.
Looking to the mountains and redwoods
as signs for progress and salvation, Big
Mama followed her sons to this forest
by the bay. Redwood City, a refuge for Black
folk fleeing the deathly current
of the south. Big Mama ran from Noxapater
and that house that stat up on bricks
with holes in the subflooring that the rats
would get through. Big Mama ran
from Big Daddy his violent, drunken stupors
that colored her life. She left it all south.
California must be better than the north—New York,
Detroit, and Chicago—she must have said
to herself expecting it to be true, expecting
the unresolved past stays deadened, unalive
in the need of her grandchildren. Her past is buried
in a capsule at the base of a cypress tree
that grows in the bay of our heart—in this ledger
there are the groanings of women, the callous
calls of children eaten by secret and violent fathers
and mothers, and grandmothers, heart-rhythms
of our family who would say None of us suffered—
Yet here we are burning in the aftermath.
In San Jose, We Sliced Tomatoes
—For Nana
Behind your mobile home, we tended
weeds and a narrow patch of soil—just
enough for tomato bushes to grow along
wire cages in slight ribbons of sunlight.
In the kitchen, you held the knife, said
This is what my mama used to do, then
reached into a ceramic bowl of salt, swirled
your hand almost like god dusting sour
crystals over the fruit. You said We used to
grow our own food and catch jack rabbits
with sling shots and rocks in the wood.
I was only a child when you gave me this
story and knew little of the way of the past.
I sat on my knees listening at the kitchen
table and imagined you and your eight
siblings—running through the deep green
Aiken woods, the jack rabbit—his long limbs
in a slow crawl, his fawn ears elongated
for fear of being caught. Heard your siblings
whisper— Elsie! Get in position! I imagined
your small hands carrying the carcass
to your mother. How pleased you must have
been to have provided good meat—the same
as you were when you placed that fat, fleshy,
and halved tomato in my hand remembering.
You were right—Home is where the heart is
broken and buried. Now as I think of you then,
mouth full of tomatoes and story, I retrace
the vermillion steps of my memory, wonder
why we let each other go. I want the past to
tell me something different of our ending—
History tells me this is too much to ask.
Previously published in Poet Lore
From “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant”
1. On a Voyage to Literacy
In Nantucket, the white folks were the same
as they were in Georgia—they just had new
language for drudgery yet were unencumbered
by the fear of a Negro learning to read.
My mistress was ambivalent toward
my learning—as long as I kept up with
the laundry (though my feet and hands soured
in the soap and starch), cooked the fish and beans
they loved to eat, and moved invisibly
about the house. I missed my mother most
in winter, held the memory of her face,
my own reflection, tenderly in my hands
in the warmth of water when I washed.
As I began to learn the alphabet,
mistress whipped me each time I sounded out
Ape-ple instead of apple or wrote whether
when I meant Weather—the snow is falling
outside our window. She called me invalid
and unable to apprehend language
or original thought. I thought and thought
of those moments when my mother rubbed
pig fat in my hair during leisure to keep
the ticks away, so the edges wouldn’t break—
as she recounted the rules of root work:
Sorghum is good for when your feet swell up.
Salt your door for protection. Say this prayer—
Keep us Lord from sinkin’ down—when cleaning
wounds. I have cleaned so many wounds—
except my own. I spent days then washing
the walls, floors, bonnets, undergarments—
determined to learn a new episteme.
I spoke to myself—Do not give this world
your flesh. Make callous the feeling of her
lash, of her criticism—learn the curvature,
the ascent and descent of sound with each
stroke of a letter—learn to write your name.
E. Hughes is the author of the poetry collection Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books 2024). They received their MFA in poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and The Rumpus—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and were a semifinalist in the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest, and long-listed for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize. Currently, Hughes is a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University.
E Hughes
Robert Stalker is an Atlanta-based freelance arts writer.
Robert Stalker