Abstract / Excerpt
Renisha McBride. Tamir Rice. Jordan Davis. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Freddie Gray. Aiyana Stanley-Jones. At a certain point, BIPOC families must have “the Conversation,” a discussion and set of instructions for surviving a world of policing, presumed guilt, and the racial inequities that threaten our very lives. It’s labeled “the Conversation,” but this discussion is never an intimate moment, never a one-time event. Instead it’s a constant choir of dissent and disembodied voices whispering and wailing night and day. Through a mix of lyric, found text, and hybridity, How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children highlights some of these voices: adults and children, murderers and victims, bookshelves and wanted posters, carnival barkers and political pundits. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s “Power” How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children calls upon the past and present in an attempt to find a language higher than the circular rhetoric that falls in and out of mass media, to hold a conversation that is constant even in silence, to escape the cycle of violence and Black death.
About the Author
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Quincy Scott Jones
C&R Press
Police Violence, The “Conversation”, Poetry
