A Poem I Like #8
BLACK FAMOUS(A FAUX HAIKU SERIES) by Javon Johnson
I just want to be
Black famous. With a show on
BET, you know
BLACK FAMOUS 2
Perhaps I could be
number 2 or 3 on the
barbershop posters.
BLACK FAMOUS 3
One day I'll show up
to see Cats on Broadway and
yell, "What's good, nigga?"
BLACK FAMOUS 4
Not too famous though.
Don't want to be a hashtag.
No twitter coffins
BLACK FAMOUS 5
Not too famous though.
I just want people to think,
He's familiar.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I laughed while reading these.
In his book, poet and professor Javon Johnson dives head first into the Black American male reality. Inevitably so many of the poems involve pain--not all of them, though. These brief poems are interspersed amongst poems with much heavier truths, and for that they are. Johnson spells out a dream, pieces of which have flashed through the minds of many young Black boys. It as dream, in parts, held by so many and yet it seldom makes it to conversation, even less so to the printed page. Reading these faux haikus is akin to "breaking the 4th wall" in cinema. As my mouth forms the words of each line, my mind is thinking: "wait, y'all were thinking that too." There's validation in that. There's community in that. There's joy in that. So I laugh.
I laugh at the BET reference, the mention of the barbershop chart we know so well, the notion of saying nigga in a typically white atmosphere, the unspoken discussion on police killing, and the nod to the baggage of fame in the black community. These embody a mix of the lighthearted, the complicated, and the painful. And still, to each, the response is it's own kind of laughter. We laugh because even when our truth is complicated and painful, it is still our truth. We laugh because we must. Ain't much else blacker than that.
