by Stacy D. Flood | Contributing Writer

This essay is part of a series in which Poetry Northwest partners with Seattle Arts & Lectures to present reflections on visiting writers from the SAL Poetry Series. On Thursday, February 9, Reginald Dwayne Betts will read and discuss his work in conversation with Stacy D. Flood at 7:30 pm Pacific time. Tickets to this in-person and online event can be purchased at the SAL website.

There is, after all, a history to the attempt to silence a people, perspective, consciousness, community, ideology, individual, voice, or vision by burying it behind walls or bars or thick ………… lines. There’s the belief that what can be obscured will simply be forgotten, and eventually lost.

But artists like Reginald Dwayne Betts, winner of Guggenheim, MacArthur, and NAACP awards, uses his poetry, playwriting, memoir skills, and life reflections to seize ownership of this practice of redaction and employ it as a powerful creative force and commentary, showing how this exercise of removal can be used to illuminate instead, each ……………. dark ……………… a powerful ………………. voice beckoning ………………… rather than ………………… silencing.

Redaction—an act of removing text under the guise of transparency by leaving the detritus of a sentence or passage while making the rest illegible—has been used countless times in legal, business, and “professional” documents in order to feign a representation of truth, however mutilated.

Through the court documents which comprise the works entitled “In Alabama,” “In Houston,” “In California,” and “In Missouri,” from Betts’s poetry collection Felon, redaction is used to brilliantly display the universality and commonality of court injustice, to place the reader in these circumstances (it’s difficult to look away from, or not try to deduce, what’s obscured), and to hold that same reader accountable. The poems dare one to look away without searching for meaning in a broken, damaging system, while simultaneously giving the reader important context for the other poems in this compilation. It is a masterwork of connecting experience, and the reader, to what is there and what ……………….. …………. ..……… ………………. is ……………….. ……………….. missing. These small moments of darkness and night, collected, illuminate the legal system’s attempted erasure of this person, past, and prominent thinker, and the impact this endeavor has years and decades later. This practice of re-envisioning redaction, not as removal but as giving prominence, is used equally effectively by Betts in his collaboration with the artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar, titled Redaction, in which Betts’s poems were screen-printed onto Kaphar’s portraits of incarcerated individuals. The result is a project where what is obscured is anything but lost.

This effect is evident throughout Betts’s work. A redacted section in the piece “In Alabama” states:

x…………. It is the policy x……… of the City to jail x…………… people
x………………………. ….……………………. x……………………….
x……………………….x……………………….x……………………….x……………………….
x……………………….x……………………….x………………………. x…………………
x……………………….
x………. It is the policy …x. x of the City to hold prisoners x………
x………………………x…………….x x………………. until x…………………… extinguished

Even in this attempted annihilation something radiates. Something, try …………..……………….. as ……..…………. ………… any system of oppression ……………….. ……………….. might, x……………….. ……………….. ………….. still remains.

Someone named …………… ………….. is here. …………… …………….., who one system or another has tried to silence, is here. ………….. …………. and ………….. ………….. are here.

The rest of Betts’s art highlights this connection, from Bastards of the Reagan Era’s “For The City That Nearly Broke Me” to the heartbreaking proclamation in Felon’s “The Lord Might Have Given Him Wings”:

            . . . & if prison is where Black

                        men go to become
            Lazarus (or to become Jonah),
                        this kid must

           already have wings.

            They call it inevitable . . .

Likewise, this connection is reflected in that same collection’s multiple poems entitled “Essay on Reentry,” which describe what returning from that imprisonment can mean to one’s future and family. One such entry includes this passage:

            You come home & become a parade
            of confessions that leave you drowning,
            lost recounting the disappeared years.          

Another poem in the series concludes:

            . . . Tell me we aren’t running
            towards failure is what I want to ask my sons,
            but it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off
            to dream in the comfort of his room, the youngest
            despite him seeming more lucid than me,
            just reflects cartoons back from his eyes.
            So when he tells me, Daddy, it’s okay, I know
            what’s happening is some straggling angel,
            lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his
            duty, lending words to this kid who crawls
            into my arms, wanting, more than stories
            of my prison, the sleep that he fought while
            I held court at a bar with men who knew
            that when the drinking was done,
            the drinking wouldn’t make the stories
            we brought home any easier to tell.     

Tragically, what can be so sinister about redaction—this removal yet leaving present—is how it can be effective at times, even for communities unjustly targeted. As the years pass we might forget about those loved ones incarcerated, and once these loved ones are returned to us, we might forget the impact this imprisonment has on their continued well-being. Time and again Betts reminds us of this, and my only subsequent ask is that we take a moment to reach out to those impacted and remind them that that they are ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. remembered, loved, and ……………….. ……………….. valuable.

Not many artists are able to add depth and breadth to their work by cutting away, by using absence to show that a people and culture remain ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. unbroken.

Some people, however, express concern that this palimpsest can sensationalize this classic form of erasure—the heavy black lines becoming more appealing in their novelty than the text obscured, the act of disappearing taking focus over the disappeared. But under Reginald Dwayne Betts’s watch, redaction becomes a beacon instead; a lightness under the weight shines through, and the heavy lines, rather, bring comfort that, though obscured, our connections are .………………… ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. ……………….. iridescent. 

—

Stacy D. Flood is originally from Buffalo. His work has appeared at ACT, Ghost Light Theatricals, Theatre Battery, and Theater Schmeater in Seattle, as well as in SOMA Magazine, Seattle Weekly, three Seattle Fringe productions, the Akropolis Performance Lab’s New Year/New Play salon, Playlist Seattle, the Adaptive Arts Theatre Company’s Night of New Works, Macha Theatre Works’ Distillery series, Mirror Stage’s ‘Expand Upon’ readings, The Hansberry Project’s REPRESENT festival, Infinity Box’s Centrifuge,FUSION Theatre Company’s ‘The Seven’ Short Works Festival, and in Starbucks’ The Way I See It campaign. He has served as an instructor at Seattle’s Hugo House and Portland’s Literary Arts as well as a lecturer at San Francisco State University—from which he holds an MA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a Clark/Gross Novel Writing Award—and he has additionally been awarded both a Getty Fellowship to the Community of Writers and a Gregory Capasso Award in Fiction from the University at Buffalo. The Salt Fields is his first novella.