She avoids accusation, taking an observatory perspective, giving all credit to the Eritreans who stayed, she being one of the Eritreans who left.īetter.

Girmay quickly dives into the recent history of Eritrea. Girmay begins with an introduction, “elelegy,” a word conjured up from the English elegy and the ululation sounds, elelelele, made in Eritrea and other parts of North and East Africa. The title of the collection-taken from the plural of the Latin word mare, meaning “sea,”-was used by early astronomers to refer to the dark, flat surfaces of the moon they believed were filled with water, a landscape as forbidding and alien as the Atlantic was during the five centuries of the West African slave trade, and as the Mediterranean and other seas are today for migrants and refugees. Thus Aracelis Girmay’s new poetry collection, The Black Maria-a haunting, blistering, vital examination of the African diaspora from 15th-century slave ships to Neil deGrasse Tyson-is a book of memories and seas. To see the full Publishers Weekly list of ' Best Books of 2016.The brutal Middle Passage across the Atlantic is one of the most painful chapters in the history of forced African American migration. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay’s newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. Taking its name from the moon’s dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. The book comprises two distinct poem cycles in which the legacies of colonialism are ever-present and language the oceanic medium through which we are simultaneously separated and connected.' In its starred review of the collection, Publishers Weekly says, 'Girmay traverses the liminal zones between personal history and sociopolitics as she lyrically explores displacement, grief, systemic racism, and more in these gorgeous, heartbreaking, and incisive poems. Recently named Aracelis Girmay's BOA Editions collection the black maria as one of five ' Best Books of 2016' for poetry.

The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay