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I.
Robert Hayden employs innovative modes of signification to unveil and expose race-based violence in the United States. In "Night, Death, Mississippi" (1966) he defies bildverbot1 traditions, or the customary injunction against representing the sacred or, in secular times, the secret. This policy pertains to what must not be shown because it lies beyond the reach of representation (traditionally, God or the Shoah) and also applies to what must not be shown because its portrayal undermines hegemonic ideologies that maintain and naturalize systems of oppression (as in the phenomena of lynching and slavery). Some topics are designated unspeakable, "beyond the veil," or simply lack first-hand witnesses. Yet, this barred access or knowledge gap due to iconoclastic tendencies in the culture does not inhibit a poet accustomed to poetry's mode of meaning by indirection. While we live in a time of relative freedom of speech and expression, vestiges of the prohibition against depicting unrepresentable subject matter have led writers and artists to seek alternate aesthetic strategies that insist on historical and contemporary realities even as they dismantle conventional realism.
Hayden's innovative portrayal of the ostensibly obscene (ob scaena) matter of a death by lynching works according to ambiguous modes that depend on the materiality of the medium (language), rather than the materiality of the desecrated body itself. By treating language as a revelatory concrete substance-a clay of sounds, a stack of stanzas, a shifting web of syntax ruled and unruled-Hayden calls attention to his creative activity, and by extension, to the hidden or forbidden subject matter as well. Thus, the medium's material qualities anchor the poem as does the space/time referent: Mississippi, U.S.A., in the mid 1960s. From this fixed point, the poet then raises metaphysical questions about society and human suffering. In defiance of restrictions against using art to signify certain categories of experience, Hayden tears away the rhetorical veil that falls over episodes too terrible to recount (to use a common collocation from slave narratives), employing a poetics of indeterminacy that both tempers and intensifies the truth with its rhetorical power. The poet's insistence on the subject matter, examining a generalized episode of a recurring event, serves as a call to witness for both those who follow his line of vision and those who...